Ingleby | Hayley Barker | The Ringing Stone

This summer, as part of this year’s Edinburgh Art Festival, Ingleby presents the first exhibition in Europe of paintings by Los Angeles-based painter Hayley Barker (b.1973).

Barker’s big, bold and beautiful paintings combine apparently prosaic personal details of the artist’s immediate surroundings in her home and studio in LA with an awareness of time passing and the contradiction of painting as a means of both measuring time’s passage and freezing the moment. Specifically, in this exhibition, Barker celebrates the cycle of the seasons in response to the play of light across the four walls of the main gallery in the old Glasite Meeting House, designed in the 1830s as a religious space, and carefully positioned to channel the shifting light, as if the building were a giant sundial.

The exhibition is anchored by four majestic paintings of the artist’s garden across the course of the year, alongside seasonally specific depictions of other scenes and still lives that play to Barker’s balance of recording intimately personal, often ritualistic, subjects that have an invitingly universal frame of reference. 

All of Barker’s works are explicitly rendered from life but also seem to come from an interior place, balancing real and imaginary worlds that suggest dreamscapes as much as landscapes. As the critic Barry Schwabsky has noted, writing in ‘Art Forum’:

‘Barker’s paintings elaborate spaces that can’t be nailed down and identified. She calls them “spaces of passage,” of transition— across the immeasurable distance from life to death, perhaps, but also within life, from one physical or spiritual state to another. Her works speak of mystery, loss: intimations of what lies beyond the boundaries of the self.’

Stylistically Barker’s paintings present something of a contradiction. Dryly painted with a deft touch and fine brushes, the intricate brushwork and patterning gives an overall impression of almost claustrophobic density, yet they also seem wide-open and full of space, colour and light, striking an unlikely and yet nuanced balance between intimacy and grandeur.