Simeon Barclay, Them Over Road, 2023 | Exploring a city’s potential for transformation

Chester Contemporary

‘Simeon Barclay, Them Over Road, 2023 | Exploring a city’s potential for transformation’

1 October 2023

How does a city begin to unpick and understand its history and identity? How does the past inform the future? In this new work for Chester Contemporary, Barclay blends neons with altered and found objects to explore a city’s transformational potential, from heritage playground to modern setting. Can the two co-exist? How does the city create a life in the body it wants to become, reclaiming its former glory or reinventing itself without stirring an inner turmoil that reflects a crisis of identity?

Them Over Road fuses historic Chester with an anxious modern Britain and asks how a focus on ‘heritage’ can often undermine a city’s aspirations, forcing it to continually push to define itself in the light of the North West’s other great cities. This dynamic is suggested by the incorporation of neons, which point towards Chester’s reputation for commerce and entertainment, while also hinting at alternative, subterranean and often subversive ways in which the city is viewed, used and occupied.

Simeon Barclay (b.1975, Huddersfield; lives and works in West Yorkshire, UK) draws on a diverse visual language, activating objects in installations that with humorous undertones come to express the paradoxes and ambiguities of situating and defining ourselves within culture and tradition. In 2022, Barclay received the Ares Art Award; in 2021, he was appointed to the Arts Council Collection Acquisitions Committee, and received an Art Fund Commission as part of BAS9. Barclay was awarded the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Visual Artists and a Henry Moore Foundation award in 2020. He is currently working on a commission for Deutsche Bank Art & Culture, and this year his work will be included in the 12th edition of Sculpture in the City. Simeon Barclay is represented by Workplace, London.

Them Over Road is part of Chester Contemporary’s Core Artist programme curated in conjunction with the Emerging Artist programme by artistic director, Ryan Gander.