Sara Barker

About

Barker’s artistic practice operates on the boundary between sculpture, painting and drawing, delicately tracing lines in space. Incorporating rods of steel and aluminium, sheets of glass and painted sections, Barker’s artworks are sometimes wall based, sometimes floor based – and sometimes moving from floor to wall and back again – reflecting her interest in how space may exist in the mind, in stories and in memories. For this exhibition Barker presents existing installations as well as a new work made especially for Ikon.

Barker’s working process begins with painting, either on canvas or sheets of metal, with a colour palette that often speaks of the outdoors – the blues and greys of sky and sea and the greens of the natural world. At times only certain parts of each painting have interested Barker and consequently she has cut into them, reducing them to narrow strips which are then removed from their original flat context and combined with other painted surfaces, metal rods and strips to make three dimensional structures.

The link with language and literature is vital to Barker’s artistic practice – when a writer describes a place, whether imagined or remembered, that space opens up in the mind of the reader, so too with art. The importance of writing and reading as well as looking and making is reflected in the titles Barker uses, yet another layer through which she describes and creates a spatial situation.