Stefana McClure

Born in Lisburn, Northern Ireland, 1959

Lives and works in New York, USA

McClure is probably best known for her Films on Paper, an ongoing series of monochromatic works composed of a succession of superimposed subtitles, intertitles, or closed captions depicting entire movies, often foreign-language films. In a recent article by Robert Davis, published in Paste Magazine, the critic noted that this "seemingly obsessive art project in which she laboriously traces all of the subtitles that appear in a film, on top of each other in layers...results in an abstract work, roughly the size of a computer monitor, that captures not the story or cinematography of a film but the shape and placement of its text, the part of the picture you're normally supposed to see right through... Her meticulous process of translation not only reveals patterns that we normally ignore but also seems to capture something essential about the language beneath—the language within—every film."

Biography

Stefana McClure was born in Lisburn, Northern Ireland, in 1959 and lives and works in New York. She holds a BA in Sculpture from Hornsey College of Art, London (1980–1984), and undertook post-graduate studies in papermaking at Kyoto Seika University, Kyoto (1993–1995), supported by a Monbusho Scholarship. She received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2001–2002.

McClure is best known for her Films on Paper, an ongoing series of monochromatic works composed of superimposed subtitles, intertitles, or closed captions depicting entire films. As critic Robert Davis has observed, her process of tracing all the subtitles of a film in layers "results in an abstract work, roughly the size of a computer monitor, that captures not the story or cinematography of a film but the shape and placement of its text... Her meticulous process of translation not only reveals patterns that we normally ignore but also seems to capture something essential about the language beneath—the language within—every film."

Her work is held in numerous public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Yale University Art Gallery; the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University; the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart; and the Museum Folkwang, Essen, among others. She has exhibited extensively with Bartha Contemporary, London, since 2009.