a weak spot in the earth is the debut exhibition at The Approach by Glasgow-based artist Sara Barker (b. 1980, Manchester). Barker’s practice traverses and blurs the thresholds between sculpture, painting and drawing; using these disciplines, and in turn their associated materials and techniques, as a way to create space, both physically and metaphysically. Barker draws on inspiration from Modernist and Post-Modernist (and primarily feminist) writers, such as Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Doris Lessing, Hélène Cixous and Aya Kōda, whose text, Mirrors1, supplies the first line of a newly imagined visual poem composed by Barker. The text navigates us through this exhibition, it is broken up and assigned as titles, both to the show itself and to each of the works within, leading our actual bodies, verse by verse, through the psychological space of the poem:

a weak spot in the earth

unnatural council

hands in cold looked blue

conjunctions

eclipses

oppositions

a child slipping

a man losing his hat

in the natural weather

hour-watching silver and exact

water is in water

within within within

window openings to

tableaus of a rebus

materialised secret

gravel in the loam

describing a change

The poem allows for a sense of pathetic fallacy to be created between the viewer and the works; the transcendental experience of exterior, natural elements brought inside, to be shared within the intimate space of the gallery. Using the poem as a conduit, the works describe emotional nuances and subtleties connected to nature. Taking influence from elements of 19th century Japanese design, where the concept of the ‘border’ is key, Barker employs thick outlines to create spaces where more curved and fluid lines are contained within. Mountains, clouds, rivers and the sea are often depicted within rectangles, themselves representing an artificial form not found in nature. During the 1800s in Japan, motifs such as these were granted auspicious qualities and a kind of poetry and mythology, reflecting intention, inspiration, and a world beyond the world.

For this new body of work, there is a tension between drawing that manifests itself within three-dimensional space and the painted two-dimensional surface. The metalwork of these sculptures starts to form shapes, and perhaps letters, characters, and/or signs; the combination of assumed semi-pictorial surface and symbol become allegorical. The linguistic supplements the visual, binding as a final image.