Sara Barker
Sara Barker’s compositions often incorporate metal, wood, paint and glass. Typically, her works are composed of irregular beams and poles that form approximations of overlapping rectilinear structures, often with sheets of glass intercepting the open spaces left between the metal and wood. Professing her desire to grasp the impossibility and spontaneity of drawing through sculpture, Barker evokes ‘that top-heaviness and precariousness’ of sketching in three-dimensional form. As such, her combinations of bespoke materials challenge traditional perceptions of structural solidity, the lightest often providing the weightiest support for the basis of the sculpture.
Barker’s conceptually intricate work is inspired by late-Victorian and modernist literature such as Virginia Woolf and Ezra Pound, and artists including Eva Hesse, Louise Bourgeois and Henri Matisse. She uses paint—oil, gouache and watercolour, applied to aluminium and steel in soft pastel shades—as a means of “activating” her pieces, providing liminal streaks of colour that she describes as “cracks in a door,” glimpses into another realm. Her sculptures are completed by the spaces in which they are installed. Emphatically inhabiting their environments, the negative spaces they create become assimilated with the physical materials, resulting in abstract, powerful and dream-like sequences of materials.
Barker has recently produced site-specific commissions …
Sara Barker’s compositions often incorporate metal, wood, paint and glass. Typically, her works are composed of irregular beams and poles that form approximations of overlapping rectilinear structures, often with sheets of glass intercepting the open spaces left between the metal and wood. Professing her desire to grasp the impossibility and spontaneity of drawing through sculpture, Barker evokes ‘that top-heaviness and precariousness’ of sketching in three-dimensional form. As such, her combinations of bespoke materials challenge traditional perceptions of structural solidity, the lightest often providing the weightiest support for the basis of the sculpture.
Barker’s conceptually intricate work is inspired by late-Victorian and modernist literature such as Virginia Woolf and Ezra Pound, and artists including Eva Hesse, Louise Bourgeois and Henri Matisse. She uses paint—oil, gouache and watercolour, applied to aluminium and steel in soft pastel shades—as a means of “activating” her pieces, providing liminal streaks of colour that she describes as “cracks in a door,” glimpses into another realm. Her sculptures are completed by the spaces in which they are installed. Emphatically inhabiting their environments, the negative spaces they create become assimilated with the physical materials, resulting in abstract, powerful and dream-like sequences of materials.
Barker has recently produced site-specific commissions for BALTIC, Gateshead (in collaboration with Ryder Architects), and an outdoor piece for Jupiter Artland, Edinburgh, as part of Edinburgh Art Festival 2013. Barker’s work has been the subject of solo shows at Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow, carlier | gebauer, Berlin, BALTIC, Gateshead, Mary Mary, Glasgow, Stuart Shave/Modern Art, Glasgow Project Rooms, Glasgow and Collective Gallery, Edinburgh amongst others.
Courtesy of CASS Sculpture Foundation