Anna Barriball: Fade

The exhibition Fade shares its title with a three-channel video that is projected directly onto the gallery walls. The large-scale installation shows the landscape surrounding a wind turbine on the edge of the town where the artist grew up. The turbine itself is invisible except for the shadow of its blades sweeping across the frame. With each sweep colours rise, modulating the image, creating a strange dreamlike state from this everyday occurrence. The atmosphere shifts as does the temperature of the image, but no narrative is offered. The shadow, reminiscent of the second hand of a clock in reverse, sweeps anti-clockwise across each projection, moving across the walls of the space and surrounding the viewer. Recently Barriball has developed various works using this form of gradated tinting arising from her ongoing interest in the colouring techniques used in early cinema film.

A series of drawings also explores colour tints and fades. Barriball uses a labour-intensive process involving dipping paper tinted with pastel into molten wax and then working the material into the contours of a found window’s textured glass. The resulting effect is of colour somehow caught beneath the sheen of a jewel-like surface. In another work the glass of the window pane itself is removed from the drawing leaving the grid of the leadwork. Looking through the glass of the picture frame and pencil grid to the colour behind, Barriball continues to investigate what lies beyond the surface at the boundary between interior and exterior space, combining the real with the felt or sensed.

Barriball’s interventions produce objects that are at once locked in time yet echo the processes by which they are made. The artist’s early works such as treated found objects and slide projections act as counterpoints to more recent architectural relief drawings, floor pieces, and video works that emanate luminous colour. Working across different mediums Barriball demonstrates how the aesthetics of everyday life can be reimagined or transformed in unexpected ways.

Anna Barriball (b. Plymouth, 1972) studied at Winchester School of Art and Chelsea College of Art and Design. Barriball has had recent solo exhibitions at Centre Pasquart, Biel/Bienne, Switzerland (2018); Be-Part, Waregem, Belgium (2017); Museum Villa Stuck, Munich (2013); Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (2012) and MK Gallery, Milton Keynes (2011). Her work has been included in the recent group exhibitions Fokus Papier, Kunstmuseum Basel (2017); Double Take, The Photographers’ Gallery, London (2016) and Apparitions: Frottages and Rubbings from 1860 to Now, at The Menil Collection, Houston and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2015).