Iceberg is a sculpture by Simeon Barclay comprised of a stack of a hutch, a yellow perspex cube with a wooden puppet of the artist in Elton John's 'Donald Duck' costume and a dog kennel

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.

A cropped image of a painting by Sooim Jeong: Synchronised, 2019 Oil on canvas 100 x 80 cm

Exhibition Feature Image

Installation shots of 'Decoy' - a group exhibition of painting and sculpture at Workplace | Newcastle - including artwork by Cristian Avram, Eric Bainbridge, Simeon Barclay, Rachel Lancaster, Sooim Jeong and Miko Veldkamp

Installation view

Newcastle upon Tyne

WORKPLACE

Decoy

Installation views of Simeon Barclay's solo exhibition 'In the Name of the Father' at South London Gallery in September 2022

London

In the Name of the Father 

A portrait of Simeon Barclay holding a transparent overhead projector acrylic that says 'plus so much more' backwards in marker pen in front of his face.

Portrait

Portraits of artist Simeon Barclay wearing a black suit with white shirt in a minimal semi-industrial setting 

Simeon Barclay

Related Artist

Simeon Barclay

Related Exhibitions