Anna Barriball’s practice combines process-based drawing and sculpture with moving image works to examine memory and the proximity of the tactile, experiential world to intangible and liminal states.
Her installation Fade consists of a large-scale three-channel moving image pieces which is projected directly onto the gallery walls. The videos show the landscape of the surrounding are of where the artist grew up, specifically a shadow of the blades of a wind turbine sweeping across the frame. With each sweep colours rise, modulating the image, creating a strange dreamlike state from this everyday occurrence. As the colours change, the atmosphere shifts as does the temperature of the image, but with no given narrative, the spectator is allowed to make their own stories up. I really like the almost unidentifiable patterns of the landscape she has chosen, like Gustav Metzger's Liquid Crystal Environments, they almost seem self destructive.
The colour techniques that she used reference those of early cinema, and as with her drawing practice the techniques themselves are laboriously and not quickly achieved. The idea of time and duration is embedded in the work on multiple levels. Meditation and endurance are words that Barriball uses in relation to her work. There is also a powerful sense of the potential for transfiguration in the domestic, as well as in the natural world.
