Sorcha Dallas

If Stephenson’s work resists easy analysis, it does so on the part of the artist herself as much as the viewer, and by laying bare her processes a wry, arch humour can be glimpsed. In effect, Stephenson’s solo show might be the equivalent of a writer writing through writer’s block.

Stephenson is unafraid to demonstrate the confusion and complexity of presenting a clear, resolved position (a pre-packaged ‘positionality’) and illuminates the paradoxes and pitfalls endemic to tracking a clear and assured path through theory.

In this body of work she shakes off the shackles of a watertight cultural determinism (one which favours fixed meaning and locks out ephemeral significance) and shows a gentle disdain for the golden promises of ‘close reading’. At the same time, the misplaced mourning for politically engaged practice can also take sustenance in this work, which questions rather than imposes belief yet nevertheless challenges the ideological values written into the viewing (and making) experience.

Susannah Thompson

from Transmission Newsletter, review of Clare Stephenson solo exhibition at Transmission, July 2004

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, Malmo, Cologne, Berlin and Buffalo. Recent exhibitions include a solo show at Transmission Gallery, Glasgow in 2004 and the group shows ‘Living Dust’, Norwich Gallery, 2004 and ‘Waste Material’, The Drawing Room, London, February 2005 both curated by David Musgrave. Stephenson has a forthcoming solo exhibition at The Round Room, The Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh in March 2005.