
The first performance work by British Artist Simeon Barclay (‘RIA Presents: Simeon Barclay, The Ruin’ ) is set to open the January season at the ICA, London on January 16th 2025. The Roberts Institute of Art (RIA) has commissioned the work as part of RIA’s Practising Performance programme.
‘RIA Presents: Simeon Barclay, The Ruin’ (2025) will combine spoken word with live percussion and horn to investigate British identity, in particular ideas of masculinity & class. It introduces Barclay’s own history growing up in Huddersfield with parents originally from the Caribbean and reflects on the industrial landscape of northern England in the 1980s and 90s. It will tour, organised by the Roberts Institute of Art, to The Hepworth Wakefield, in Yorkshire later in March 2025.
Simeon Barclay is known for his sculptural and installation practice which is rooted in material histories. He uses pop cultural references to discuss personal and cultural memory and navigate imposed and self-created identities. Barclay has an intense interest in the body and the self, investigating how self-image is created and grappled with. Fashion, dance, the theatrical, posing and adornments are intricately woven throughout his work and have informed the evolution of this new performance work; a new step for Barclay in his practice.
With this new performance Barclay questions a mythic idea of Britain through a personal lens using a soundscape that combines spoken word, rhythm and melody with a mix of musical influences from early modern music to the industrial sounds of Barclay’s youth. Barclay has written a monologue for this work and will perform himself for the first time alongside a percussionist and horn player.
With RIA’s support, Barclay has developed The Ruin’ over a year-long period that has included R&D conversations with artist, performance maker, researcher and designer Moi Tran and theatre designer Agnes Treplin to explore how performing bodies project themselves and their characters.
FAD managed to grab a Barclay to ask him a few questions about The Ruin’ and working with RIA
Tell us about ‘The Ruin’?
This is a work commissioned by the Roberts Institute of Art (RIA) as part of a programme they’ve developed called ‘Practicing Performance’ to support artists who want to explore performance. RIA Presents: The Ruin combines spoken word with live percussion (by James Larter) and horn (by Isaac Shieh) to investigate British identity, in particular in relation to masculinity and class. Drawing on my own memories of growing up in Huddersfield with parents from the Caribbean, the piece reflects on the changing landscape of northern England when I was a young boy and teenager in the 1980s and 90s as well as the dreams, hopes and frustrations that were experienced across generations during this period. Words, soundscapes, melody and rhythm all come together to evoke the images and feelings I am exploring in this piece.
What was it like working through stuff with RIA?
I haven’t worked in performance before so together we spent a lot of time discussing the nuts and bolts of performance: the ways you bring audiences into the space of the performance, for example by considering basic but important things like how you hold an audience’s attention. So we’d ask questions like how will the performance begin? Slowly, with anticipation, or with a bang? We listened to a lot of music, from early modern consort music, Sun Ra, Shostakovich’s symphony number 11 to the industrial soundscapes of the Icelandic composer Hildur Guðnadóttir, making notes on the kind of sound I wanted to achieve and how this might support and play with the spoken word. The research process also involved going to performances. One that stood out was Mary Said What She Said, a Robert Wilson production with Isabelle Huppert about Mary Queen of Scots. I was struck by the incredible precision of Huppert’s delivery and physicality, as well as how so much emotion and atmosphere was conveyed through such minimalist staging and lighting. This led to thinking about the ‘sculptural’ quality of space and movement. RIA introduced me to artist and set designer Moi Tran, who I spoke to about the technicalities of set design. Although I am working more with lighting than sets for the final piece, these discussions were invaluable in thinking through how important space and atmosphere are to performance.
Has your interest in fashion played a part in the process?
My father was a tailor so I’ve been interested in the craft of clothes making since an early age but I’m also fascinated by how we clothe ourselves in garments in ways that accentuate or hide our personality or that give an outward presence to our interior thoughts. I was also interested in how clothing can act as armour and defence. In terms of how clothing intersects with class and masculinity, I’ve been reflecting on my own memories of working-class men paying careful attention to their looks.
As part of the research process I met with Agnes Treplin, course lead for the MA Costume Design for Performance at London College of Fashion, thinking about the role of costume in performance. For the final performance, I wanted to explore how we can imagine clothes and identity without showing it, so I decided rather than working with actual costumes to focus on conveying these ideas through text and sound.

Can you explain why you chose to focus on class as a topic?
Class is the main structural element that guides British culture, but it is also an identity characteristic that is hard to pin down, even more so when you think about it intersectionally. In Britain class is a thorny issue that seems to be on the one hand constantly evolving and on the other stuck in the past. I’m interested in the ambiguity of class, the powerful role it played in my own life and the continuing impact it has today.
It says that the performance relates to questioning a mythic idea of Britain – can you tell us more about that?
Growing up the child of parents who had come from the Caribbean, the British Empire as a concept loomed large. Britain for me is this dynamic place, that’s always regenerating itself, yet the residue of Empire looms large in some people’s imagination, its rooted in a need to get back to a mythical way of what Britain once represented. I’m interested in the tropes of British identity, many of which are ancient and also rooted in class – like knights in armour and a reverential respect for inherited power. In this performance, I look at the domestic and how my own family grappled with class through furnishing and interiors, and think about the language of valour, its redundancy and how that word might be occupied or performed in the contemporary moment. With James and Isaac, the musicians, we’ve explored how to convey this mythic sense of Britain through sound and rhythm.

How has it been working with musicians – the live percussionist and horn players?
I have a great respect for other artistic crafts, and I have often worked in collaboration with other artists in the past; for example, I worked with a puppet maker for my South London Gallery show. Working with James and Isaac has been a wonderful experience, because working with two people who are so gifted has enabled us to literally jam with ideas and so find ways of bringing words alive. We developed the music through improvisation in workshops, refining the moods we wanted to convey through conversations and notations. I’d read the script and hear how they would respond musically, and this has been captivating.
What should people expect to see if they turn up at the ICA?
Audiences will be taken on a journey from the bleak moors of Northern England, to the closer, intimate spaces of touch and self-fashioning. They’ll hear about the search for pleasure, thwarted dreams, dejection, but also the strength and resilience that comes from imagination, play and making. I hope the performance will show a unique example of collaboration and the power that comes from bringing sound and word together in a live performance.
‘RIA Presents: Simeon Barclay, The Ruin’ Thursday 16th January 2025 — 6.30 and 8.30 pm ICA, London TICKETS
Duration: 35 minutes
The performance will also tour to The Hepworth Wakefield later in 2025.