That art categories are no longer as clearly defined as they used to be is made clear by Claire Barber's installation at the Fremantle Art Centre.  This installation is accompanied by an artist's book, which is part performance documentation and part novella.  Although the exhibition has been dismantled, the book is still available.

Claire is a young British artist who was selected from a large field of applicants to be the 1998 Sir Robert Menzies Creative Arts Fellow.  This award is managed by the Sir Robert Menzies Centre for Australian Studies of the University of London.  It is tenable only at the School of Visual Arts at the W.A. Academy of Edith Cowan University.

After graduating as a textile artist, Claire Barber completed an MA at the Royal College of Art, London and then embarked on a peripatetic career as wandering artist, accepting residencies in widely differing places, including Czechoslovakia, the prestigious British boy's school, Marlborough, and recently Geraldton Art Gallery.

Her work to date has tended to be site specific and very ephemeral.  Where objects are made at all they are always exquisitely crafted.

Her installations are often nostalgic and always informed by her natural sense of the poetic.  Somehow she manages to combine a peculiarly British sense of the particular with a high modernist, minimalist, reductionism.  She responds to an environment with a landscape artist's sense of time and place.  One early piece in London saw her making a site specific artwork at 4:00 AM near the foot of Nelson's Column with the collaboration of a flock of Trafalgar Square pigeons who obediently formed themselves into rigid geometric patterns (helped no doubt by carefully laid out bird seed).  At the white cliffs of Beachy Head, she cast black feathers into upward draughts of wind, while her recent Geraldton residency has seen her use dust as her medium.

The Red Gown is her account of the eye opening experience of coming to Australia from a claustrophobic British winter, spent as artist-in-residence at the military inclined Marlborough School.

Knowing little about Australia in general, and Western Australia in particular, she started in the library where she quickly learned of the title "The Cinderella State".  Soon she was journeying, like an early settler, east and north-east, beyond Kalgoorlie to Kanowna and up to Day Dawn and Cue.

She personally recreated the colonising move inland.  To epitomise the sense of Cinderella in this strange land of promise and melancholy she has made exquisite dresses, pierced and cut, so that fragments are like butterflies or flowers falling on the harsh desert soil.

A golden dress was made, and worn, in the goldfields, the fragments laid like a princess's bridal train across the foreign soil.  In old Kalgoorlie nothing could have been more valuable and yet more useless than a fine bridal gown.  Photographing herself in these garments, she has provided a summary in the artist's book, and earlier displayed the finely made originals in the appropriately heritage building of the the Arts Centre, Fremantle.

At a time when creative artists still tend to be locked out of the lucrative research environment, Claire shows how essential research is to the creative artist who wishes to go beyond the narrow boundaries of art.

There are many personal icons in this well considered exhibition. The visitors' book indicated that there had been many gallery goers who had connected immediately with the show's gentle creation of a language appropriate to the ideas.