Sorcha Dallas

‘Strange events permit themselves the luxury of occurring…’ – Charlie Chan. Claydon views history as retrospective, subjective and intrinsically fictitious, and (cultural) objects as satellites that constellate around subjects, situations and rituals. Their orbits describe the various negotiations, narratives and trajectories that inhabit an alinear dimension, but which are ordered with hindsight into timelines and histories. In his work Claydon aims to spotlight these absurdities by arranging a collision between contemporary cultural signifiers and their historical counterparts, extruding new material from the debris. In creating such eccentric evolutions, he shifts his subjects’ potency from the pre-eminent to the redundant. Utilizing traditional and ad-hoc methods of production, he also constructs a climate where accurate and semi-fictional resonances accrete and self-replicate independent of their material hierarchies. ‘Steven Claydon’s sculptures, paintings, posters and films perform dense explorations of cultural counter-factuals and historical might-have-beens.’ Tom Morton, in Frieze 96, January-February 2006