This summer season, as a part of this 12 months’s Edinburgh Artwork Pageant, Ingleby presents the primary exhibition in Europe of work by Los Angeles-based painter and Jux alum, Hayley Barker. Barker’s large, daring and delightful work mix apparently prosaic private particulars of the artist’s rapid environment in her house and studio in LA with an consciousness of time passing and the contradiction of portray as a method of each measuring time’s passage and freezing the second. Particularly, on this exhibition, Barker celebrates the cycle of the seasons in response to the play of sunshine throughout the 4 partitions of the primary gallery within the previous Glasite Assembly Home, designed within the 1830s as a non secular area, and punctiliously positioned to channel the shifting mild, as if the constructing have been an enormous sundial.
“I’m from Oregon, part of the US the place seasons are very distinct,” Barker says. “Nevertheless, I’ve been dwelling in LA for the previous 9 years, and I’ve had the chance to witness the seasons in a brand new mild. The solar and gentle climate of southern California provide much less dramatic modifications within the panorama however modifications which are no much less impactful. As a result of the vegetation, flowers, and bushes stay considerably contiguous, I grew to become extra conscious of the small modifications and the moods they encourage. Digging deeper, I spotted that dwelling between the pure world’s cycles and the calendar of our seasonal rituals and holidays grew to become a method of displaying that point does move even whereas the panorama of my backyard stays considerably the identical. Whereas portray this present, it grew to become clear that making a cycle of work in regards to the seasons required me to think about how we expertise the passage of time, each in nature and culturally. Holidays move virtually right away, as does a flower bloom and wither. A tree springs new leaves and drops them. The moon is all the time transferring by her cycles. Stones have gradual and lengthy lives, their tales too previous to know. How can we transfer by these many lives we dwell amongst with grace, respect, and dignity? How can we honor the earth and her many inhabitants over time and area? How does it really feel to dwell a 12 months with particular consideration to how one celebrates, marks, and notices seasonal modifications whereas experiencing the lengthy and virtually invisible cycles of time passing?”
The exhibition is anchored by 4 majestic work of the artist’s backyard throughout the course of the 12 months, alongside seasonally particular depictions of different scenes and nonetheless lives that play to Barker’s stability of recording intimately private, typically ritualistic, topics which have an invitingly common body of reference.
Stylistically Barker’s work current one thing of a contradiction. Dryly painted with a deft contact and tremendous brushes, the intricate brushwork and patterning provides an general impression of just about claustrophobic density, but in addition they appear wide-open and stuffed with area, color and lightweight, hanging an unlikely and but nuanced stability between intimacy and grandeur.
“My husband and I visited the Ringing Stone of Tiree final summer season,” Barker notes on the inspiration of the present. “The Ringing Stone was dropped at Tiree as soon as upon a time. It has pock marks carved into it from the Bronze Age which have been used for ritual, however what sort of ritual is unknown. Trekking to this stone throughout sheep-filled fields alongside the beautiful coast of Tiree, merely visiting this stone was a pilgrimage. However assembly it was arresting! Taking a stone to strike the boulder, then standing again to listen to the resonant ringing sound – this took my breath away. I felt myself within the firm of numerous folks earlier than me who honored this stone being and met to carry out some sort of marking of time with phrase or motion. Communion with the pure world, transferring by time with rituals to mark our shared bodily and energetic lives! – that is what I dwell for. I wished to color the Ringing Stone instantly.”