Sara Barker
undo the knot
29 April – 23 May 2021

Entry is free and by pre-booked appointment only
Thurs–Sun, 11am-4pm

We will have a number of measures in place in line with Government guidance.
These will include limits on visitor numbers, physical distancing, increased hygiene and wearing of face coverings. You can read about them
here

We can accept one booking per hourly time-slot, which can comprise up to six visitors from up to a maximum of two households

We are delighted to reopen undo the knot, an exhibition of new work by artist Sara Barker, for three weeks from 29 April. undo the knot initially opened on 31 October 2020.

Sara Barker’s work blurs the lines between sculpture, painting and drawing, as well as between figuration and abstraction and between imagined and physical spaces. Not quite sculptures and not quite paintings, her work typically explores the boundary between those disciplines. Her recent work has been large-scale and has involved working within angular, indented aluminium trays or ‘trenches’ as containers for painted and sculptural elements: ‘The tray, a surface with edges, has become a foundational and flexible structure for me, to pour material into and out of, from which widely differing configurations, depths and shapes can spring.’  

Unusually for Barker, the exhibition features a number of exploratory works, and of her decision to include them Barker has said: ’It didn’t feel right to remove all of the rawness, the first draft, not in this setting, not at this time. I wanted some of that rough execution, of metal meets glass, meets wood and wool and wire’.

Barker has drawn upon the rural location of Cample for these new works as well as from the fiction and poetry that she reads, providing fragmented glimpses of narrative within the works. In Barker’s work, the fusion of industrial processes and materials with image, narrative and memory are particularly resonant in the context of Cample.

Largely created during the first national lockdown, and in her home rather than her studio, Barker has made a body of smaller-scale work for CAMPLE LINE, comprising a series of wall-based reliefs that incorporate painted and molded brazed brass, steel and aluminium as well as everyday materials such as wood, cardboard and wire. Notably the work marks a reduction in scale for Barker, all of the 18 works included being ‘smaller than my screen, some as small as my books’.

Sara Barker was born Manchester, and lives and works in Glasgow.

Her practice is primarily sculptural, but incorporates painting and drawing, and blurs the lines between these disciplines. Her work combines industrial and sculptural materials together with collage, painting and craft techniques, and often Barker draws on her interest in the work of Modernist writers. Her artworks are sometimes wall-based, sometimes floor-based, and sometimes moving from floor to wall and back again – reflecting her interest in how space may exist in the mind, in stories and in memories. 

Recent exhibitions include: All Clouds are Clocks, All Clocks are Clouds at Leeds Art Gallery (2020); – a weak spot in the earth, The Approach, London (2017); and the Faces of Older Images, Mary Mary, Glasgow (2017); Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (2016); Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (2016); Frauenzimmer, Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen, Germany (2011); Ville du Parc Contemporary Art Centre, Annemasse, France (2009); Open Eye Club, Tramway, Glasgow (2008).

Past commissions include Leeds University (2018); Angel Court Piazza, London (2017), CASS Sculpture Foundation, Goodwood, West Sussex (2015); and Jupiter Artland, Edinburgh (2015).