Anna Barriball: New Works

By meticulously tracing their surfaces with pencil or ink, she magnifies incidental details and textures created by everyday wear and tear, resulting in works on paper that have a sculptural quality.

Barriball’s drawings often seem to hide as much as they reveal, becoming more than just an investigation of domestic surfaces – she is interested in the space between the invisible and the visible.

Barriball is fascinated by windows and their function as barriers between the interior and exterior world. The largest work in the exhibition takes the form of a three-paneled drawing based on the experience of looking out through a window at night. Made by placing thin paper over patterned glass and saturating it with black pigment and wax picture-varnish, the intensive process results in a drawing that has a burnished quality and a depth which suggests something beyond its surface. In another window-based piece Barriball has created a collage of strips of paper painted with white ink, while the reverse of the strips are coloured with fluorescent pencil. Here with the simplest of means the artist evokes light shining through closed venetian blinds.

The imprint of an under stair door has been made using silver ink on rag paper. Isolated from its functional setting the acute shape becomes an uneasy sculptural form. Again the back of the paper is covered with fluorescent colour which glows around the edges of the work giving a sense of something under the stairs, of something behind the door. This sense of concealed space is further emphasised in a series of small works based on air vents.

The seemingly abstract video piece Heartbeat actually depicts the reflection of sequins on the artist’s T-shirt, the points of light vibrating with Barriball’s own pulse. Other pieces in the exhibition include drawings that trace the lead-work from window designs depicting the sun’s rays, where the cut paper casts strong shadows within the image itself. In another work the soot from a candle reveals a window grille, the smoke gathered in the centre disrupting the uniformity of the grid.

Anna Barriball (b. 1972, Plymouth) studied at Winchester School of Art and Chelsea College of Art and Design. Barriball has had recent solo exhibitions at Museum Villa Stuck, Munich (2013), and Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (2012), MK Gallery, Milton Keynes (2011). Her work has been included in the recent group exhibitions The Bottom Line, SMAK, Ghent (BE), Drawing Now, Albertina, Vienna, (AT) and Apparitions, Frottages and Rubbings, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (USA).