Claire Barclay: Openwide
Until April 12; Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh

Claire Barclay’s sculpture is like narrative theatre, frozen at the point of highest tension. The scene is set, the characters’ stories have been woven together, and everything is poised to change, irrevocably, at any moment. The past is a suggestive mystery; the future a tantalising tease.

Barclay makes her work in response to the space where it’s to be shown, using the gallery, in the run up to a show, as her second studio. The installations are precarious: dangling, balancing, propped and dropped; once their component parts are deinstalled, the story is over, the work undone.

This approach has worked for Barclay in the 16 years since she graduated from Glasgow School of Art’s prestigious MFA. It worked in the decaying splendour of a palazzo at the Venice Biennale, and in the white-walled contemporary galleries of London and New York.

Knowing this, the Fruitmarket Gallery set Barclay a challenge. They wanted to mount a quasi-retrospective of her work, alongside two new commissions. For the first time, the artist would have to find a way to exhibit pre-existing work without turning it (as she sometimes does) into something entirely new.

The result is fascinating. Rather than surrendering previous works for curators to reconstruct, Barclay has come up with a way to keep things creative. Around 30 small objects taken out of their original contexts (like theatrical props divorced from their plays) are displayed inside Barclay’s own museum-esque setting. Collectively, they are renamed Openwide.

Key to the success of Barclay’s work is the sense that her sculptures not only have a mysterious past, but also designs on the future – and on us. Wood on the brink of overbalancing, leather threatening to rip or silk to slip, brass rods lurking at ankle-height, willing us to bring everything crashing down; it’s all alive with latent energy.

But in some of the niches of Barclay’s museum-style display, her specimens are killed off, rendered inert by their new, safe containment. Sewn leather flaps, once hanging precariously from a nail in DCA, now sit comfortably on a waist-high plinth. Two turned wooden poles, once propped with a wing and a prayer against a Venetian wall, are neutralised at the back of a display box. Like real museum specimens, they retain their past, but are dead to future possibilities. Their latent energy has seeped away.

These disappointments are, in a way, the deaths that keep the plot exciting. Other parts of Openwide are alive with teeth-on-edge potentiality, like the curling raw hide and aluminium tubes drawn from Foul Play, which perch on a slope, on the brink of sliding into a crumpled heap. Then there’s the oak chair gone wrong, leaning on a wall in corridor space. If it’s not knocked down by a passer-by, it threatens to sink its discrete brass blade into the bottom of the first person who tries it for size.

The artist abandoned readymades in 1992, finding them to be too specific in their associations. Ever since, everything has been specially constructed, either by Barclay herself, or to her specifications. Nothing is quite pin-downable: functions suggest themselves (like the chair that is not) and then retreat. Primitive materials and crafts mix with precision machining. The one thing each object shares is a sense that it is special – to the point of being a fetish.

Part of that air of ritualism comes from Barclay’s choice of materials – woven straw in a circle of black painted steel suggests some neo-pagan rite, while leather-bound hoops hint at sexual play. But a palpable sense of care has also gone into the making of these objects: the artist learning a range of specialist crafts in order to make them precious.

Barclay offers new departures in her new commissions as well. Building on a recent installation in Camden Arts Centre, she has created two spaces which suggest human habitation. Caught In Corners is a strange mix of stone-age village and rococo boudoir; Subject To Habit is more bauhaus school gymnasium.

As always with Barclay, it’s a mass of contradictions, like the modern patterned cloth draped over lime-rendered hay bales, and sharp mirrored glass sharing a precarious heap with drawers of downy feathers. In all of it though, is the feeling that human bodies belong here, living and sleeping and carrying out their daily rituals.

Whether it’s a precision-made gym or a roughly-hewn eco-village, we humans need our cocoons, to give us a world that we can control. Mirrors and feathers, exercise mats and lifting weights are the paraphernalia of our customs and rituals, virtual cocoons to fit inside the physical ones. But if she has stripped us bare of our protective shell, Barclay has done it with the gentlest, sexiest, and most poetic of touches.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 15.02.09