Ingleby | Hayley Barker | The Ringing Stone

14 June - 31 August 2024
  • 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.

     

    'I am from Oregon, a part of the US where seasons are very distinct. However, I have been living in LA for the past nine years, and I have had the opportunity to witness the seasons in a new light. The sun and mild weather of southern California offer less dramatic changes in the landscape but changes that are no less impactful. Because the plants, flowers, and trees remain somewhat contiguous, I became more aware of the small changes and the moods they inspire. Digging deeper, I realized that living between the natural world’s cycles and the calendar of our seasonal rituals and holidays became a way of showing that time does pass even while the landscape of my garden remains somewhat the same. While painting this show, it became clear that making a cycle of paintings about the seasons required me to consider how we experience the passage of time, both in nature and culturally. Holidays pass almost in an instant, as does a flower bloom and wither. A tree springs new leaves and drops them. The moon is always moving through her cycles. Stones have slow and long lives, their stories too old to know. How do we move through these many lives we live amongst with grace, respect, and dignity? How do we honor the earth and her many inhabitants over time and space?  How does it feel to live a year with special attention to how one celebrates, marks, and notices seasonal changes while experiencing the long and almost invisible cycles of time passing? ’ - Hayley Barker 

     

    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. 

  • Hayley Barker
    Summer Valentine Path, 2024
    oil on linen
    258 x 212.5 cm (framed)
    101 5/8 x 83 5/8 in
  • Hayley Barker
    Autumn Moon Garden 2, 2024
    oil on linen
    258 x 212.5 cm (framed)
    101 5/8 x 83 5/8 in
  • Hayley Barker
    Winter Moon Garden, 2024
    oil on linen
    258 x 212.5 cm (framed)
    101 5/8 x 83 5/8 in
  • Hayley Barker
    Spring Valentine Path, 2024
    oil on linen
    258 x 212.5 cm (framed)
    101 5/8 x 83 5/8 in
  • 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.

  • Hayley Barker
    The Ringing Stone, 2023
    oil on linen
    187 x 247.8 cm (framed)
    73 5/8 x 97 1/2 in
  • 'My husband and I visited the Ringing Stone of Tiree last summer. The Ringing Stone was brought to Tiree once upon a time. It has pock marks carved into it from the Bronze Age which were used for ritual, but what kind of ritual is unknown. Trekking to this stone across sheep-filled fields along the stunning coast of Tiree, simply visiting this stone was a pilgrimage. But meeting it was arresting! Taking a stone to strike the boulder, then standing back to hear the resonant ringing sound - this took my breath away. I felt myself in the company of countless people before me who honored this stone being and met to perform some kind of marking of time with word or action. Communion with the natural world, moving through time with rituals to mark our shared physical and energetic lives! - this is what I live for. I wanted to paint the Ringing Stone immediately.' - H.B.
  • Hayley Barker
    Summer Mood Board, 2023
    oil on linen
    112.7 x 82 cm (framed)
    44 3/8 x 32 1/4 in
  • 'Rituals, to me, are like seasons or cycles; they are a chance to step into a spiritual space, a time apart from time, to mark our places in the cycle of life. Spirals of time and experience are a thread that holds us all in this physical and spiritual world, and we are thus united with all life before and after us. I want to slow down time. I want to take it all in and move with intention. Rituals help with this. I mark time with seasonal mood boards, planting seeds, decorating for holidays, and honouring moon cycles.' - H.B.
  • Hayley Barker
    Autumn at Michael's Arts & Crafts, 2024
    oil on linen
    261 x 196.8 cm (framed)
    102 3/4 x 77 1/2 in
  • Hayley Barker
    Autumn Equinox Moon, 2024
    oil on linen
    135.4 cm (framed)
    53 1/4 in
  • Hayley Barker
    Hawk Visitor (3), 2024
    oil on linen
    112.6 x 82 cm (framed)
    44 3/8 x 32 1/4 in
  • 'I tend to experience the subject of my works through a lens of psychology, emotion, dream, and spirituality. I imagine that every hawk, every garden, every moon, and even every craft store has something special to offer on a deeper level. Communion with these things via the painting process allows me to explore the imaginative life of my subject. I believe in the divinity of all things. And I do believe that we are embodied co-creators with the world around us. Time is multi-layered in every single moment, and that moment expands upon closer examination. Delving into this kind of long, slow collaboration with time via the painting process allows me to get to know the already familiar subjects of my work on a spiritual level. It’s a dreamlike place to move into and also an embodied prayer or spell.' - H.B.
  • Hayley Barker
    My Folks' Xmas Tree, 2024
    oil on linen
    217 x 130.5 cm (framed)
    85 3/8 x 51 3/8 in
  • Hayley Barker
    Orb Weaver 2, 2023
    oil on linen
    112.6 x 81.8 cm (framed)
    44 3/8 x 32 1/4 in
  • Hayley Barker
    Cherry Blossom Branches, 2024
    oil on linen
    64.8 x 219.2 cm (framed)
    25 1/2 x 86 1/4 in