Rosalind Barker

  • Curriculum Vitae
  • Links

Current work

  • Influences from my residency at Viraco Pencil Factory Portugal 2023

Exhibition Archive

  • Don’t eat the Pomegranate? Free Painters and Sculptors 2024
  • we should have stayed here....contour drawings 2023
  • us - future for ROOTED 2022
  • Puzzled Token Women Series 2021
  • ‘nobody’ Artist gallery residency Jan 2020
  • Token Women Drawings 2019 - 2020
  • 2019 'us' CA+R The Crypt Gallery and The London Ultra
  • 2019 EX LIBRIS
  • OVERDRAWN Drawing Prize 2019
  • 2018 Rhinoceros Domesticus
  • 2018 'us' The London Group and Friends
  • 2017 'Home' The London Group and Friends
  • 2014 'The Send Off' Knole House The National Trust
  • 2013 Ko-ax Drawing Prize
  • 2013 'Objects Of Desire'
  • 2012 Memory Box Drawings
  • 2012 AiRM - Art in Romney Marsh
  • 2011 Apokrisis - A Hairy Story
© 2011 - 2025
Theme by WPShower

2010 ‘Ask Freud’ for ‘Eidos’

‘Ask Freud’ for ‘EIDOS’

Porcelain, plaster, household dust and debris situated in a glass case.

Traditional figurines’ conformism is manifest in their reflection as a behavioural model regarding social class, gender and aspiration. They are cultural artefacts that may allude to beliefs, myths and rituals.

Barker’s dust figures are a mix of found and created plaster artefacts. In the dust figurines the artist mimics and references the mass-produced factory object while instilling time and effort into the creation of each individual hand crafted piece referencing the time taken for dust to accrue. The dust is applied with painterly precision; dust is the substance that holds life together and could be viewed as a witness to human physical and spiritual vulnerability, ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust’

The ‘debris’ of dirt and dust, coarse flakes of skin cells, domesticated animal hair and bits of unidentifiable protrusions is linked to the repetitive domestic actions undertaken as a daily home cleansing ritual. Dust seems useless and insubstantial, a nuisance, a danger to health and a substance to be thwarted in the arena of the treasured relic. This dusty debris holds a residue and the human DNA and data of her collective family. Barker wants us to question perceptions of ugliness on the outside masking a beautiful interior and vice versa.  The artist has subverted the aesthetic of the cherished and valued beauty of the figurine. The juxtaposition of the gentile and the disgusting engenders our repulsive fascination.

Denied the expected elegance of space to preen and reflect in our admiration, these figurines huddle in a confined and claustrophobic space. A sense of unease and catastrophe are summoned

Ask Freud
Ask Freud
Ask Freud - Detail
Ask Freud - Detail
Ask Freud for Eidos
Ask Freud for Eidos
Ask Freud
Ask Freud