Visual Work
Suspended and Stitched (Mother and Child)
Author:
Sally Barker
About Sally
Sally Barker has an M.A. in painting but works using many different art mediums. She currently works mainly with sculpture, installation and digitally manipulated photography. She exhibits nationally and internationally, deliberately seeking a wide range of gallery and non-gallery environments, from Tate Modern and the ICA, to the fells of the Lake District and the back end of a bus! Whilst regularly exhibiting her work, she also maintains teaching and project work as a freelance artist. She currently works for a small arts organization, which supports artists with acute and enduring mental health problems, helping to develop and deliver art activities for people in hospitals and prisons.
Abstract
Suspended and Stitched (Mother and Child) (2013) incorporates large pieces of stone that have been split apart, drilled, stitched back together with rusty wire, and then embedded with latex casts of the artist's nipples. One piece of stone hangs, suspended from a beam; it is connected to a smaller piece using delicate rusty wire, and both pieces balance precariously over a poured piece of rubber, one that appears to be a split pool of milk. Attached to the upper piece of stone are the artist's latex cast nipples, emerging organically, they are thus called 'The Nipple Flowers', and were first made by Barker twenty years ago. Here they are here remade, to engage with the theme of ageing and progression as well as that of fertility and breast-feeding one's child. The overall work at once creates and destroys balance. Fragile, creaturely structures break free and are at the same time connected to the strong, grounded and weighty. Broken, split and cracked, materials are then healed and repaired. Elements are connected, but inevitably they move apart.
