Glasgow-based artist Sara Barker has forged a distinctive artistic practice that blurs the thresholds between mediums, employing various disciplines to create both physical and metaphysical space within her work: sometimes expansive, but also claustrophobic. Incorporating painted and moulded brass, steel and aluminium as well as everyday materials such as wood, cardboard and wire, Barker conjures worlds, abstract scenes constituted from linear shapes drawn in metal. Rooted in language, she explores and explodes the tension that exists between line and surface, seeking to find a way to control or articulate material's own animacy.
To quote Susanna Beaumont: “Barker’s reliefs are akin to pages from a diary, sketches sketched, a draft of a composition, a quickly written musical score. [In her work] is a kind of unearthing, a reveal. A series of archaeological sites filled with the physical, the familiar and the unidentifiable, the less pin-down-able shaky dream, the half-recalled and the fast-dissolving memory. Earthy yet brittle, [Barker’s work] gives evidence of time spent, time stretched, time corrupted, ordered and disordered.” Sara Barker (b. 1980, Manchester, UK) lives and works in Glasgow, UK.