Artist Page: Ruth Barker

Ruth Barker is a Glasgow based artist who works with text, performance, and installation.

Her practice uses a strange poetry to throw autobiographical sketches together with echoes of humanity’s oldest stories. Reflecting theoretical ideas of connectivity and finitude, Barker works between written text and spoken word, often recounting her complex prose-poems from memory as live performances. Her practices, on first examination, foreground the artist’s own daily experiences and the quotidian narratives of life as a mother-of-two in contemporary Scotland (nappies and pushchairs, shopping lists from Lidl, Hovis bread with cut crusts, stubbled legs and the TV news). However, the work is underpinned by the larger, longer stories of our own mortality, our sense of self, and our unconscious internalisation of ancient myth. Barker’s performance poems are hypnotic, ritualised, events, often accompanied by lavish costume or unconventional locations. Her words are layered in structure and intensity, and use repetition, mnemonic, and moments of unexpected humour. Barker’s exhibition practice uses installation, audio recordings, scripts, and sometimes chaotic assemblages to draw the essence of a performed work into a staged re-encounter with the artist’s voice.

Ruth Barker is represented by the Agency Gallery, London; theagencygallery.co.uk