Artist Steven Claydon - The Hepworth Wakefield

Steven Claydon (b. 1969, London, UK) is a London-based sculptor and musician and has performed and shown work internationally, including at Tate Modern and Switzerland’s Art Basel. He trained at Chelsea School of Art and Design and Central Saint Martins, London.

Steven Claydon describes sound as sculpture and approaches this medium through the senses – combining light, smell and sound with solid materials to produce artworks that are often not what they might seem on first encounter.

A collector of cultural artefacts, Claydon repurposes objects and data into sculptures that are full of intentional contradictions.

His work invites the viewer to become the excavator as objects from the past are re-conjured with contemporary materials and new technologies.

‘I always try to make something that then gets up and walks off. Once that collaboration has taken place, between the material and the idea, then it just kind of charges off. Sometimes I don’t even recognise the things that I’ve made.’

The Hepworth Prize for Sculpture

In 2016, Steven Claydon was shortlisted for The Hepworth Prize for Sculpture.

The six sculptures and site-specific interventions he made for the Prize exhibition activated the space around them and engaged with the architecture of the gallery. This could be seen in Re-de-extinction Table (2016) where seemingly inanimate objects created a low-level ambient sound.

Re-de-extinction Table presented a pair of antiquity heads recast in resin sat on top of a table with a gold-plated copper surface embedded with impressions of old £10 bank notes.

Oppositional forces of attraction and repulsion are also at play in Claydon’s work. Industrial yellow curtains were imbued with the scent of citronella, designed to repel mosquitoes; a series of wall-mounted lights used in Like Shooting Sparrows in the Dark 3 (deterrent lure) (2016) contain blue LED light bulbs, similar to those used to attract squid in deep-sea fishing; and Magnate (obelisk) (2016) featured a large wall covered in rubberised magnetic sheeting, holding pennies tight to the material surface.