Sara Barker: Plant Dreaming Deep

For her exhibition at FOUR, Sara Barker will present a precarious sculptural grouping in the gallery, pushing material to a point of fragility and slightness of form.

Sara’s recent work centres on the room as an abstract notion on which to hang an interior state, taking on the attributes of a character- their ‘aloneness and inhibition’, in their own space.

It is with her eye on literary conceptions of ‘room’ that she explores constructs of working and living space in relation to her own private process. The idea of a room is elaborated on as a metaphor for and a symbol of identity and liberation, restriction and conformity. It is a necessary space but with implicit cultural boundaries, and its own incumbent freedoms and limitations.

In recent work, she draws indirectly on the journals of May Sarton:

“I am alone here and ‘the house and I resume old conversations’… The ambience here is order and beauty. That is what frightens me when I am first alone again…I have made an open place for meditation. What if I cannot find myself in it?”

Journal of a Solitude, May Sarton.

In preparing for this show, Sara was drawn to Maeve Brennan’s short stories, particularly the posthumous collection set in Dublin, The Springs of Affection, particularly such apparently simple and direct stories of family life as The Sofa and The Carpet with the Big Pink Roses on It. From these points of reference and interest, Sara applies a formal and regulatory structure: a routine within her practice. Rather than the illustrative, Sara inspires individual perception, memory and influence, by way of a 'painterly' shift from the real.

Recent exhibitions include The Actuality of the Idea, Modern Art, London and Base: Object, Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York. Sara has recently completed the Rome residency at the British School at Rome, and is represented by Mary Mary, Glasgow.

Plant Dreaming Deep Sara Barker Curated by Aoife Tunney Opening: Friday 7 August 2009 6-8pm Exhibition continues from 8 August–1 September 2009

Sara Barker
Plant Dreaming Deep
Kurator: Aoife Tunney