Art at the LCP

Hilary Barry writes: My work is driven by a fascination with the oil painting process and experimental approaches to its possibilities. The context and content is drawn from aspects of universal experience: I am interested in the remembered experience — its inaccuracy and subjectivity, the convergence of the figurative and abstracted. These themes broadly inform much of my work.

My painting is about visual memory. I want to make my work a link to our inner chain of experiences: the recurring images in my work are filtered according to my own personal experience. People and places stand out in memory, distorted and coloured by thought. I do not feel my memory is something I can trust. The elusive world within memory is where particles of life cluster, disperse, and cluster again; a world where time is understood not as a linear narrative, but rather as a simultaneous bombardment of sensory perceptions.

I have always been attracted to the constant interaction between ideas, image, and mark making: exploring areas of intensity and of space, and seeking a balance between form and meaning. There is a constant interaction between ideas and marks, and assessing the relative success of a series of actions in describing any particular moment is an ongoing process. Surfaces are reworked, layered, scraped back and covered; ghosts of under-painting emerge as shadows. Paintings can be left for weeks or finished in hours.

Sometimes I know exactly what I am trying to achieve and sometimes a work will lead me to a different destination. Some of the work seems hazy — as if there is a veil across the surface, to press the observer to bring the image into focus and decipher its open-ended content.

Steven Mendoza on Hilary Barry: Barry’s painting struck me first as striking figure painting, striking for its ‘handwriting’, for its three dimensionality, for its varied expressions through colour and most of all for the sense that these are people depicted and something is going on, what, it is not clear.

Her figures are built up by a series of marks ‘from the back’ instead of being filled into an outline. This gives them the feel of solidity even though their composition is diffuse because they go ‘round the back’ as three dimensional objects seen in the outer world do. Her text above reveals the mystery of her painting: that it is not from life but from memory, they are not figures in a world but figures in an inner world. They peer through the fog of mind intimating often disturbing emotions as we peer at them. But her concern with the concrete properties of painting, the sensory impact of a display in the intensity and diffusness of colour which painting allows is very much in the outer world of visual perception and it is this sensory power which gives it its power of evocation in the inner world.

This is the great tradition of painting, honoured by contemporary curatorship in the breach, but, like psychoanalysis, persisting in its power to embarrass us with the truth and disturb us with the uncompromising quality of experience.