An unexpected aftereffect of wandering through “Thrum”—Scottish sculptor Claire Barclay’s substantial exhibition this past spring—was a lingering low-level sense of dread. Barclay’s art is mostly abstract and elliptical: mysterious but not menacing. Her post-Minimalist forms, realized as sprawling installations or self-contained tableaux, are always stern and sensual, playing intelligently on tensions between austere sculptural frameworks and decorative or expressive features. Barclay pieces together hardy, high-quality industrial materials—steel frames, timber beams, machined brass fittings— into open-form configurations, then embellishes them with softer, lighter elements: stained and dyed canvas, cotton thread. She values the discipline of technological and artisanal processes while also reflecting on ways that built structures and designed environments define limits and shape experience. Barclay is drawn to different manifestations of control and, perhaps inevitably, to situations in which control might be lost. “Yield Point,” her spectacular 2017 show at Glasgow’s Tramway, took its title, for instance, from the term for the quantity of stress a solid material can endure before losing elasticity. Beyond its yield point, in other words, an object will be unable to return, unaltered, to its prior state. Barclay’s use of the term, conceptually framing a series of formidable sculptures developed in response to Tramway’s architecture (the building was once a railway terminus) marked a specific heightening of her continuing interest in formal and material tensions. But the idea of a critical yield point had metaphorical value, too. With a series of metal cages grouped in one section of the space, the installation evoked the predicament of constrained human bodies, stretched and squeezed in circumstances of demanding labor or extended confinement.

In some respects, “Thrum” felt like a belated sequel to “Yield Point,” still pivoting on situations of extreme pressure, while edging toward darker, more ominous territory. Allusions to industry and craft were again significant: Barclay cited Scotland’s and Northern Ireland’s shared history of textile production as an inspiration, and over three floors a range of cloth types, variously rough and refined, were strung up and spread out in contrasting styles. The huge hanging expanses of walnut-brown and honey-orange canvas in the title piece, Thrum (all works cited, 2022), resembled materials emerging from a large-scale manufacturing process. The vestment- or frock-like forms composing Inwards and Backwards—slender patterned robes suspended from custom-made clothes hangers—suggested correspondences with both liturgical ceremony and the catwalk. Real-world references were not, however, pinned down. Rather, Barclay’s compositions seemed pitched at an anxious remove from identifiable reality: They were rich in labor-intensive detail, physically compelling as room-commanding sculptures, yet also enigmatic and uncanny. In every room, Barclay fomented an insistent sense of control yielding to chaos. Though adorned with polished-brass combs and copper ornaments, the white-linen sheets in Still to Settle—sagging across the MAC’s Sunken Gallery like laundry on an improvised line—were made purposefully grimy with applications of earth pigment. Elegant metal accessories spoke of sophisticated care and craft, grubby cloths of hardship and dislocation. Close to the quasi-ecclesiastical garments of Inwards and Backwards, Barclay displayed the brutally clashing anatomical work Bloom: two strange, bulbous sacks of ocher-stained fabric, slung from hooks like joints of raw meat in a slaughterhouse. The tenderly exposed appearance of these drooping, bulging, pinkish objects connected with an undercurrent of violent possibility that pulsed (or thrummed) throughout the exhibition. The splendidly theatrical canvas hangings of Thrum were accompanied by pointedly threatening industrial details: sharp polished blades on the floor, hinting at forces exceeding any technical purpose, and high-mounted steel hooks, from which flowed long strands of cotton thread like fabulous cut-off tresses of silvery human hair. In such moments, Barclay’s cultivated art turned convincingly toward the gothic, creating visions of physical danger and damage, pointing to the struggles of vulnerable bodies and to pressures beyond their control.

— Declan Long