Claire Barclay: New Monoprints: Online Exhibition

Claire Barclay was born in 1968 in Paisley, Scotland. She received a Master of Fine Arts from Glasgow School of Art in 1993. Barclay is best known for her sculptural and installation works that combine a range of processes, materials and surfaces, as well as drawings and prints. Although Barclay is best known as a sculptor, her approach to printmaking is closely related to her sculptural practice, working with forms in space. Barclay often creates a series of similar but unique works.

"Within my practice as a whole, I seem to avoid creating autonomous works, instead preferring to make series of elements that speak to each other within a space"

"I employ screenprinting in a very improvised and spontaneous way, often using cut paper or fabric to create simple motifs that become combined or overprinted in different ways to create more complexity.  Solid black shapes seem to describe forms, and very transparent ink layers create a sense of depth and fragility within the works."   

"Despite their simplicity, the images are suggestive of the body, or bodies, or parts of the body, or functions or movements of the body, and at the same time could also suggest inanimate functional objects.  The combinations of geometric and abstract shapes perhaps triggering our inherent ability to anthropomorphize what we see.  Despite the unsophisticated bold graphic quality of the shapes, the resulting works seem able to communicate something more ambiguous and sensitive about the intimacy between objects and beings.  For example, the way the pointed corner of one shape touches and threatens to puncture the roundness of another, or the way a bold solid shape is printed over another and seeming to dominate the other shape."  

"I see a correlation between the way I make sculpture and the way I have developed my approach to printmaking.  The placement of shapes on the page is like arranging objects in space and the production of series of printed images like the related elements in my installations.  The use of a limited colour palate, (often black, red or flesh tones), transparency, layering, and a focus on negative space and the relationship of one shape to another, are properties of both my sculptural and print works.  Occasionally I have printed onto unconventional materials, in doing so, blurring the boundaries between three-dimensional and two-dimensional work, for example, screenprinted motifs on aluminium foil or vellum."

Barclay had a joint exhibition in the Print Studio Gallery with Christine Borland in 2002 and a solo show in 2010 as part of Glasgow International Festival of Visual Arts.

In 2003 she represented Scotland as part of the Scottish Pavilion in the Venice Biennale, and has been the subject of numerous solo presentations including in Tate Britain, London (2004), Camden Arts Centre, London (2008), MUDAM, Luxembourg (2009), Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (2009), Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (2010), and Tramway, Glasgow (2017).