Simeon Barclay

Simeon Barclay draws on diverse cultural sources, creating works that activate complex cultural histories and explore both imposed and self-curated identities. He combines appropriated imagery with text and sculpture, to address aspects of British culture, politics and economics, as well as aesthetics, memory and subjectivity. In particular, he draws on his time in the North of England’s manufacturing industry, contrasting its realities to the aspirational glamour and theatricality of imagery in sources like Vogue. In the major solo exhibition ‘In the Name of the Father’ (2022), Barclay deepens his enquiry into legacy, identity and masculinity in particular, through the lens of the father-son relationship – in multi-media works that provocatively intervene in the South London Gallery’s architectural space.

In ‘Iceberg’, Barclay presents a puppet of himself, encased in a tinted Perspex cube. Set between a dog kennel and a chicken coop, the cube plays on the tropes of minimalist sculpture; with a long-standing interest in the conflation of Pop and Minimalism, Barclay considers what it means to bring content into the latter’s traditionally empty containers. The puppet has been cut from the mobile in his sculpture ‘Walls in the Head’, and transferred to the cube – escaping one institution, only to be consumed by another – and draws on notions of visibility and concealment, optics, self-perception and helplessness. The puppet, dressed in Elton John’s 1980 Donald Duck costume, is an allusion to the vaudeville and variety performance of the British TV culture of Barclay’s childhood; it comically, absurdly conveys how outlandish fashion can enable both hyper-visibility and invisibility, as a means of rejecting dogma and enabling self-reinvention.