Sara Barker is an artist based in Glasgow, and currently lectures in Painting and Printmaking at the Glasgow School of Art. Barker's practice-based research activity is internationally recognised over a 15-year career of solo and collaborative projects, exhibitions, and published work.
Significant exhibitions include: The End of the 20th Century: The Best Is Yet to Come, Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof, SURFACE WORK Victoria Miro, WOMEN TO WATCH National Museum of Women in the arts, Washington, Tracing the Century: Drawing from Tate Collection, Tate Liverpool, Moments of Being: an exhibition based on the writings of Virginia Woolf, Tate St. Ives, CHANGE_THE_SETTING Ikon and Fruitmarket (solo) & the NOW series National Gallery (solo).
As a recent graduate of Glasgow School of Art, Barker set up the gallery 'Mary Mary' with Hannah Robinson and Harriet Tritton in Glasgow (named after Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley) with the intention of showing work by underrepresented artists.
Barker's work encompasses aspects of painting, sculpture and drawing and collage - employing these disciplines and speaking to their associated histories, stretching materials and techniques to their limits, moving between two and three dimensions, to reach into and distort space, creating tensions and disrupting surface.
Linear metalworks become elaborate drawings in space, their extrusions delineating shapes, letters, characters and signs - the combination of assumed semi-pictorial surface and symbol become allegorical. The linguistic supplements the visual, binding as a final image.
Language is a navigational tool, invisibly annotating the work and often literally guiding us around an exhibition via titles, leading our actual bodies through the interconnected psychological space they create.
Barker's research draws upon experimental narrative forms, from the modernist writing of Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Doris Lessing, Hélène Cixous and contemporary fiction of Ali Smith, Alice Oswald, Aya Kōda, and Rachel Cusk. Literature offers up portals for enquiry - the exploration of interior states, fragmented and multiple perspectives, and abstracted landscape. Pictorial space, narrative and the medium are simultaneously fractured, knotted together, snipped, and overlain elsewhere.
"Every work since that encounter with Woolf has been in a sense an estimation of that physical boundary, closed door, a fathoming of inside & out of it. It has engaged me in projects around modernist materialism, the book as talisman of the self, and understanding form through materialism."
Barker's research asks questions of human entanglements in relation to particular kinds of material forms – crossing into the anthropological and archaeological, looking at the significance surfaces with sides – the fieldworker’s finds tray, the dialectics of inside and outside, hiding places – the psychology of secrecy & the reveal, the archive box, taking a particular interest in narrative diorama & surrealist poetic theatre housed in shallow wooden ‘shadow’ boxes.
'I actively bring research and teaching together, motivated by the fresh evolving perspectives of the student body, revisiting my own library of practical, conceptual, & ethical concerns to bring new insight upon original research, in a spirit of active enquiry & curiosity fundamental to Higher Education"
Sara Barker (2022)
