For its second exhibition since the opening of its new, shiny banana-shaped building last September, Firtsite has managed quite a coup: commissioning Steven Claydon's first major show in a British institution. It's surprising that it hasn't happened before. Claydon's work has been included in exhibitions from London's Hayward Gallery to Long Island's Sculpture Center; he is no doubt one of the most respected artists of his generation in the country, and yet museums lagged behind. Not anymore — and it was worth the wait.

"Culpable Earth" is a thrilling mise-en-scene of Claydon's ongoing concern with the life of objects, the values and meanings they acquire and lose, and the links existing between shape, material and use. Most of his sculptures have an appealing patina; they looking like the artefacts of a disturbingly familiar world, a slightly skewed version of ours. "The passage of differentiated substance" (all works 2012) gathers on a low plinth a large dark ceramic barrel adorned with beardy face, the hubs of two car wheels, also in ceramic, and a wheel made of wicker. Embedded in the plinth, two girders stand like tracks for the fictional vehicle hinted at by these loose parts. The display begs the question: is a highly breakable wheel still a wheel, and not just the memory of another object — the two irreconcilable because lacking a shared function? And would a real wheel cease to be that once put on a plinth?

The exposure of this disconnection between the original and subsequent uses of artifacts runs through the show as a leitmotif. One of Claydon's compositions includes a small votive figure, which he claims comes from "the first civilization in the Indus Valley." The artist provocatively added extra arms to it, mocking the holy aura granted to all things old. "I mess about with it a little," Claydon told ARTINFO UK. "For me, [this figure] is just as important as when I get a piece from a Hoover. Because really that's what it is. When it was built it had a kind of utility and then it lost it and it was thrown away. It's only because of its provenance and the venerability of its age that we give it some kind of value."

More than the object itself, Claydon addresses the "meta-object," what he calls the "accretions of signifiers" that accumulate around things, almost to the point of becoming a thing of their own. "What happens when an object becomes a cultural heirloom?" he asks. The artist pokes into what he describes as a "secular animism," unwrapping the many lives of the inanimate. In his work, the viewer-sculpture relationship is often the reverse of that resulting from the "messed about" Indian antique: Claydon creates pieces that appear ancient while simultaneously negating their authenticity. The bicephalous saint of "Convolute" could have been hacked off a cathedral high-relief, if it wasn't for the fact that it is made of amber-like resin. The piece doesn't fit in any easy-to-define period. It belongs to an imaginary temporality, acting, like Claydon's practice, as a prism through which to revaluate the present.

To contact the writer of this story, write to Coline Milliard at cmilliard[at]artinfo.com