page_title: Shelagh Cluett
section_title: The 1980s and '90s
hierarchical_section_title: Shelagh Cluett / The 1980s and '90s
caption_attribution_description: English: Painted aluminium sculpture
context_page_description: Shelagh Cluett was an artist and fine art lecturer working in London, England, from the late 1960s until 2007. Cluett became a recognised figure on the London art scene in the early 1980s with exhibitions of her large metal sculptures appearing internationally. She worked at Chelsea School of Art and Design as a lecturer, and after 25 years, took up the position of Head of Postgraduate Studies in 2006.
context_section_description: In the mid 1980s Cluett's work began to move away from linear forms to explore the influences of her travels in the Far East; they provided her with a new wealth of imagery and an intensified palette, lending greater freedom to her sculpture. Colours gathered greater importance; applied to more expansive hammered metal surfaces, they cause the work to shine and glisten. Though travel research was an integral part of Cluett's working process, it had to be fitted around her commitments at Chelsea College of Art and Design, where she had become a Principal Lecturer and head of the MA Sculpture course.
  She exhibited her works in Briain and internationally, in France, South Korea, India and the United States.
  Cluett became increasingly fascinated by the charged relationships between the spiritual and the physical in the buildings she saw – the sacred landscape of the architecture. She began to use the computer to manipulate temple plans, shaping them to position the viewer in relation to the structure. The plan was then sandblasted on to a stone slab, which left it in polished relief against the vulnerable surface of the exposed stone. Cluett believed this practice created tensions in her work; the juxtaposed surfaces at once drawing the viewer in with tactility of the stone, and pushing them away with the manipulation of the plan, eventually leaving them to float somewhere in between.
caption: Burmese Nights, 1984. An example of Shelagh Cluett's 1980s work. Burmese Nights appeared in Vogue.[5]
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