Clare Stephenson
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Eye, 2005
Born: 1972, Newcastle Upon Tyne
Based: Glasgow
Represented by: Linn Luhn, Cologne; Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow
Born in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne in 1972, Stephenson graduated with a BA in Sculpture from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee in 1996 before serving on Glasgow’s Transmission Gallery committee. Stephenson has exhibited in group shows in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Stirling, Tyneside, London, Malmö, Madrid, Berlin and Buffalo and in solo shows at Edinburgh’s Talbot Rice Gallery, Dicksmith, London and Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow. Forthcoming projects include a solo show at Linn Luhn, Cologne in 2008.
In Clare Stephenson’s most recent body of work monumentally-scaled collages of drag queens vie for attention, embodying the dialectic between determinism and free will, materialism and decadence. Like much of her work of recent years, Stephenson’s poised, posing drag queens and bandaged heads (ovoid sculptures made of layered shards of white and off-white which appear as something between mirror-forms and clumsy, simplified faces) draw on French literature and art of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The ideas and images of Genet, Zola, Huysmans, the Goncourts, Cocteau and Daumier abound, and are played off against one another. The figures themselves, however, are not literary characters but are more like condensed allegorical sculptures.Formally, the queens are composed of repeated images of Baroque church sculptures, and they are similarly ‘divine’, combining religious pomp and theatricality, transcendent materiality and sedate pseudo-piety. Earlier works (e.g. The Eel, Wigs) also explored the interplay between the realms of the material and the performative or essentialism and existentialism, creating parodic, slippery allegories on these themes. In her work, Stephenson brings together apparently binary oppositions in dazzling, often absurd contradictions, as though the antithetical Symbolist and Naturalist camps of the late 19th century had joined forces to confound their public. It seems, though, that Stephenson’s sympathies lean towards the deadpan pathos and hyperbolic gestures of decadence, defying modern materialism through an exaggerated and spectacular aesthetic.
