Interview with Sara Barker

22/01/21

Interview with Sara Barker

Sara Barker: undo the knot
CAMPLE LINE, Scotland
3​1 October 2020 – 30 January 2021

Sara Barker (b1980, Manchester, UK) uses a combination of materials – initially, rougher, cheaper ones, such as cardboard, and, later, more permanent metals such as steel, aluminium and brass, alongside glass and automotive paint – to create works that blur the boundaries between figuration and abstraction; sculpture, painting and drawing; and imagined and physical spaces. The tension in her pieces is felt viscerally by the viewer, who is drawn into a dialogue, already taking place between the works themselves. Heavily influenced by literature, poetry and language, Barker calls for human interaction with her creations.

 
Her exhibition undo the knot, on show at CAMPLE LINE, includes, for the first time, what Barker describes as “exploratory works” – her initial, rougher “sketches” – which are not yet fully resolved, leaving open questions. Part of her motivation to include these works was the change in her approach to her practice, brought about by the first lockdown, when she became incredibly aware of a sense of having too much, endless time, yet simultaneously of none of it being available. Working from home, instead of her studio, she sought to bring her full daily experience into her work – all of the mundane and profound moments of life. 
 
I spoke to Barker via Zoom about how lockdown altered her practice, the role of tension and fragmentation in her work, and how the building at CAMPLE LINE became a work in the exhibition in its own right.

Watch the interview here

 
 

Interview with Anj Smith at Hauser & Wirth London

04/10/15

Anj Smith: Phosphor on the Palms

Hauser & Wirth London, South Gallery

22 September – 21 November 2015

With 21 paintings produced over a three-year period, Anj Smith’s latest exhibition as Hauser & Wirth London is her largest yet. It is also her most psychologically motivated and probing. An artist who seeks to celebrate the medium of painting, Smith sees the figure as a device on which to hang her concerns and her explorations of social mores. Her paintings – deeply layered to create an intense colour and incredible luminosity – deal with issues of liminality, androgyny, language, art history and zoology, amongst many others. Monkeys frolic with shattered Ming vases; a cigarette butt is revered as equal to a Van Cleef jewel; deep, dark eyes stare out from hollow sockets.

Smith’s works collapse the genres of still life, landscape and portraiture, freely referencing those who have gone before her: from 17th-century Dutch vanitas painters to so-called outsider artists, Richard Dadd and Adolf Wölfli. While acknowledging the importance of recognising where she is coming from and taking responsibility for her references, Smith is also at pains to make work that is of our time. The intricate detail, painted with single-hair brushes – stubble on a figure’s cheek, a moth hidden in the stonework, translucent veins beneath the skin – is like a reward system, whereby the viewer benefits from each further minute spent studying the work and experiences a different painting, depending on the perspective from which it is approached. Smith’s work can only be fully appreciated in the flesh and this is a valiant display well worth spending some time with.

Watch the interview here

Review of Roni Horn: Butterfly Doubt at Hauser & Wirth, London

17/06/15

Roni Horn: Butterfly Doubt

Hauser & Wirth, London
5 June – 25 July 2015

“The world is wasted on the young. Youth is my oyster.” The walls of Hauser & Wirth London’s north galleries are currently plastered with such statements: inverted idioms, pickled proverbs, experimental poetry of a surreal nature. Roni Horn (b1955) uses words as her motifs, moving them about to suit her canvas, engendering new forms of expression, sometimes speaking with a greater clarity than the original material.

Her exhibition, which spans both north and south galleries, is made up of three recent series: the just described Hack Wit (2013-14), Or (2014) and Remembered Words (2013). Each is made using her surgical method of cutting up two original drawings and splicing them together, carefully tessellating the pieces. The results are at first seemingly random, creating nonsensical jigsaws but, on closer inspection, there are threads and links running through the works. Nothing is arbitrary.

To read the rest of this review, please go to: http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/roni-horn-butterfly-doubt-review-hauser-and-wirth-london

Review of Eva Stenram: Positions at the Siobhan Davies School of Dance

22/02/15

Eva Stenram: Positions

Siobhan Davies School of Dance

16 January – 22 March 2015

Just as languages are made up of signs, carefully arranged according to rules of syntax, so dances are made up of positions, choreographed to present a certain imagery. In her various series of photographic works, currently on show at the Siobhan Davies School of Dance in Southwark, Eva Stenram collates these different postures – actually digitally isolated from 1950s and 60s pin-ups, not dance-related at all – into a dictionary of gesture and posture, full of possibility of meaning.

All around the building – in reception, in the meeting room, in the stairwell, in the toilet – she has hung works from her on-going series, Parts (2013-14). Stockinged limbs, some with fishnets, most with stilettos, on leather sofas and carpets with thick pile, the feet arch as a moment of intimacy or rapture is interrupted. Carelessly discarded, these legs appear sinister – the images could perhaps be crime scene shots. This uncanny element resonates still more with the chosen real world surroundings when, upstairs, outside the practice rooms, a row of empty shoes stand in line, beneath a photograph of a castaway limb.

To read the rest of this review, please go to: http://www.photomonitor.co.uk/2015/02/positions-2/

Review of William S Burroughs: Can you all hear me? at October Gallery

13/01/15

William S Burroughs: Can you all hear me?

(Including works by Brion Gysin, Liliane Lijn, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Shezad Dawood and Cerith Wyn Evans)

October Gallery, London
4 December 2014 – 7 February 2015

A novelist, short-story writer, essayist, heroin addict and accidental killer of his second wife, Joan Vollmer, William S Burroughs II (1914-1997) was a key figure of the Beat Generation. Described in the 2003 Penguin Modern Classics edition of his semi-autobiographical novel Junky as “one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th century,” his radical ways of thinking and passionate attempts to deconstruct control systems have profoundly influenced a great many artists in his wake, sending repercussions throughout popular culture and the visual arts, as well as the field of literature. Indeed, alongside his novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays, Burroughs also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, made many appearances in films, and was himself a photographer, collagist and painter. During the last 15 years of his life, when he lived relatively peacefully in Lawrence, Kansas, near to where he grew up, he produced a large body of visual art, although this remains far less widely known than his written work.

While living in London in the late 60s and early 70s, Burroughs made strong connections with many noteworthy figures of the British art scene. The founders of the October Gallery worked with him from 1974, and in 1988 hosted his second solo exhibition, his first outside the US. It is fitting, therefore, that at the conclusion of the centenary of his birth, the gallery opened this exhibition of 25 of Burroughs’ visual works, displayed interwoven – collaged almost – with 15 works by artists he influenced.

To read the rest of this review, please go to: http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/william-s-burroughs-can-you-all-hear-me-centenary