Ett eget bo

Homemaking is made of the most essential elements of a home, in terms of protection and delimitation from the outer world. The walls consist of transparent materials: plastic sheets, skin-coloured nylons, and threads stretched out horizontally and far apart. The floor, which has been smeared with mud, holds three holes that could be anything from toilets and rubbish-heaps to allotments or places for hiding valuable possessions. On first inspection it looks – in its simplicity – as a cross between a children’s hut, a shanty in a refugee camp, and the very first stage of the construction of a house. But soon precise, elegant and contradictory qualities and details emerge: the fine seam in the skin-like nylon, the punched-out pattern of a newspaper, the winding traces of fingers in the dry mud, the rolling circle formations in a purple leather belt.

Homemaking is a type of room that practically everyone could build and decorate according to taste, fancy, inclination and resources. It’s made of our human properties and abilities, both the socially accepted ones and those we’re supposed to keep to ourselves. It’s a place of our own, in the balance between ”the normal” and ”the deviant” – the stretchable limit between the secure and the dangerous, the playful and the cruel, the enjoyable and the painful. It is also the intersection between our own experience and those things in ourselves that we’d rather forget about.

The tension present in Homemaking is based on a series of unexpected constellations of materials and proportions. Joined in this manner, they have the ability to describe as well as to generate psychological and physical experiences in us humans. This way of working with the qualities of the materials is characteristic of Claire Barclay. Her take on textiles, metals, wood, chemical compounds and plastic seem to propel their physical and immaterial properties to a new level, reflecting the state of mind of the observer. These idiosyncratic combinations of materials deal, at a deeper level, with contrasts and subtle dislocations in quality, scale, and balance. In that way, Claire Barclay creates a multi-level dialogue – between materials, between observer and materials, and within the scope of every individual material.

The work of Claire Barclay can be described as a combination of a firm conceptual stance and a craftsmanlike method. A narrow, but practical definition of craftsmanship includes manual construction and a possible practical use of the resulting object or product. In Barclay’s works, the craftsmanlike function is often imitated – the object appear to have a practical use, reminding us as they do of objects that we know the function of. But soon the objects reveal their real, different meaning, their special message to us. In Homemaking, the artist also accounts for the construction process itself – a home, a hut, a hiding-place that all of us could patch together. In the Claire Barclay version of this home, the materials seem to be set free from their usual places and functions, posing elegantly phrased yet uncomfortably insistent questions on the inner and outer spaces of the human being.