Claire Barclay: Yield Point

Claire Barclay’s work is always partly created in-situ, and in this case, responds to the raw industrial aesthetic of Tramway’s exhibition space.  Her installation ‘Yield Point’ addresses relationships between the human body and the industrial workplace, in particular, the physical states of strength and vulnerability that underlie human engagement with skilled manual work.  Large sculptural forms, suggestive of processes of manufacture, inhabit the gallery like odd factory remnants. Their forms and materials seem to relate to mundane overlooked aspects of production, like the cleaning, organizing and protecting of bodies both human and mechanized.  These sculptural works convey the artist’s interest in the potential drama of objects and materials when they coincide, collide, and interact.  Heavy structures are poised, unfixed and threatening, and substances flow and transform over the duration of the exhibition.  The work incorporates fabricated and engineered elements, produced with the help of local companies, that highlight the relationship between craft and skilled workmanship found within the context of the factory.