Anna Barriball

Anna Barriball’s works convey an intimacy with the overly familiar. She smothers the surfaces of everyday objects so they become seductively sinister husks of their former selves. Made by placing a large piece of paper over a door, and rubbing it with a pencil, Door is a drawing that assumes the qualities of a sculpture. Its burnished graphite surface captures every subtle detail of the original object, while the paper warps and fluxes through repetitive handling to gain a solidity of its own. Central to Barriball’s practice is the time and effort involved in the making; her process formulates as poetic meditation, finding a delicate fascination in the mundane and overlooked.

Black Wardrobe is a bureau wrapped seamlessly in tape. Anna Barriball used obsessively repeated actions to press and rub the tape into the cupboard’s surface so that the coating forms a second skin that reveals the dresser’s most minute textures. Suffocated in black, the cupboard is almost unrecognisable as a solid form, becoming instead a monumental void connoting absence and memory. Through her intensive process, Barriball unveils a mystery in the domestic and familiar. Her work alludes to a synaesthesia of sight and touch, where senses merge and become heightened.