Simeon Barclay

Simeon:

Squeeze up nuh man!

Down the M62 in a tin can deliverance. Buffeted in darkness. Hidden in dank fog. Battered in driving winds. Obscured in driving snow.

I'm an artist based in Leeds in West Yorkshire. I create large installations that encompass objects, sonic sound performance, sculpture, and I write also. A lot of the ideas for my writing come from stuff that's been collected in the world, whether it's on bus journeys, from history, my own personal journey. All this stuff is then fed into the work.

I grew up in Huddersfield, where you have this train station frontage. When we were young we hung around it hoping that some of that grandeur would rub off on to us.

The statue of Labour Prime Minister Howard Wilson has been erected out the front. He was very forward-thinking. His policies brought in the motorway network across England.

The M62 was a lifeline. The escape route to new frontiers where you could take in new fashion, new music, new becomings. We explored these frontiers as our peers had done, who would come back with stories that would create in us a sort of hunger to see what was over the hill. Huddersfield was sort of like the springboard. It's a place that in reality I escaped from, but I had unfinished business with.

The Ruin is a spoken word piece that will take you on a journey through different emotional territories.

I grapple with the Yorkshire Moors, particularly the part that comes out of Lancashire into Yorkshire through Scammonden. I used to love driving through that stretch. It's mechanical, it's serial. There's this contrast between its undulating beauty, but as night comes over there is a kind of darkness that swallows you. The weather is very climatic. It fluctuates between heavy rain, heavy fog, heavy wind, heavy snow.

Simeon performing: Of climatic distortions

Of gargantuan terrain

Of dust

Of fog

Of ice

Of wind

Of snow

In dust

Lost in all of the above In darkness

Simeon: The studio is where I sort of bring different elements together as a way of sort of understanding how the text will work itself into a performance. Simeon performing: Boy you mustn't run

You mustn't cry

You mustn't fraid

You mustn't hide

You must hear

You must feel

You must do

You must learn

Brush your teet

Comb your hair

Simeon: Performance has always been there. My dad, who was a tailor, when he first arrived in the country would shove the sofa to one side and he would unfurl this cloth, turning it into suits of armour that me and my brothers could wear and parade up and down the lounge. That's performance. I'm really interested in the alchemy that happens within performance. It's a kind of communication within space that changes the molecules of that space, I feel. The energy that you put into the performance is then transferred to the crowd. The crowd sort of bats it back at you. It's the kind of circular thing that energizes the space.

Nothing else matters, bar what's going on on stage.