Sorcha Dallas

Spike Island has commissioned Glasgow based artist Clare Stephenson to develop a new installation for summer 2009. This will be Stephenson’s first major solo show in a public gallery.

The artist has created as series of monumentally-scaled, collaged drag queens which vie for the attention of the viewer. The figures, with titles such as ‘Miss Verily-Existent’, ‘Miss Perpetually Unfolding’ and ‘She-who-Presents’, start life as small collage works on paper, with elements originally taken from illustrations of Gothic architecture. They are then transformed into two-dimensional forms, poised in an intense static performance, awaiting their audience. This exhibition is a continuation of Stephenson’s most recent body of work which draws on French literature and art of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The artist uses camp as a form of self-consciousness, a way of both asserting and questioning the value of art, artifice and object making.

New elements of She-who-Presents will be produced in-house through Spike Print.