I become almost a shadow
I become almost a shadow is a line borrowed from American poet Ann Quin’s ‘Three’, published in 1966, where Quin describes the sensation of sharing a room with a series of shadows moving across its walls and ceiling. Barker’s abstraction of this line from the poem seems compatible with what the sculptural works in this show are attempting. They are a series of large, wall-based reliefs on all four walls of the gallery, and three self-standing sculptures that occupy the central floor area. They are all delicate, almost improbable, constructions using strips of metal and aluminium, painted cardboard, plywood, strips of reflective material, and thin brass and metal wiring. They are organised improvisations with material.
The wall based works are reminiscent of windows, but ones so exploded and distorted that, as one navigates around these sculptures, they start to become framing and re-framing devices of themselves. The self-standing floor-based works are of the scale of doors, but ones that have been taken apart and fragmented, rotated, and rebuilt, and they are delicate to the point that they might slump or fall at any moment. They sit on slightly raised white pedestals, emphasising the threshold between these artworks and the viewer.
The gallery space is evenly lit from a series of skylights and by the lights in the gallery itself, all flat, diffracted light. The only shadows possible here are the ones that the sculptures represent—the sculptural lines of these works become analogical, they become tracings of shadows on the inside of a volume, the nature of which can be barely guessed. It compels the viewer to try somehow to clamber into them, and try to read their bounding volumes from
Sara Barker, I become almost a shadow, 2014. Installation view. Courtesy carlier l gebauer, Berlin.
