KATIE POPPY MINTO
Alice Barker: The Theatrics and Maze of Identity
“I went to a French Catholic school where I couldn’t speak the language. I spent two and a half year being very quiet, but then I fell in love with art lessons, you could be good at that class without speaking French.”
“A lot of people want to understand what I’m painting and why, which more often than not I don’t have an answer to,” London-based artist, Alice Barker, tells me as we take the winding stairwell up to their studio. Barker is currently situated within their second year at TURPS Art School on their artist-led painting programme, after previously graduating from Edinburgh University’s Painting BA in 2021. It was Barker’s participation in the RSA (Royal Scottish Academy) New Contemporaries 2023 exhibition that positioned them as one of Scotland’s promising talents. As we arrive in the windowless, artificially bright room we’re welcomed by the rhythmic hammering from a studiomate’s corner. Barker leads me to the back, grabbing a chair for me on their way. Their space is littered with scraps of paper and wooden structures eagerly waiting to be swathed in canvas. We settle into the paint speckled chairs, avoiding resting our feet on anything of particular importance, as Barker tells me about their childhood spent growing up in Angoulême, France. It was their Father, a writer, who pushed them into painting, setting up easels for a 6-year old Barker and their twin sister. They tell me about their appreciation and tether to drawing as I gaze around the studio to find smaller scale sketches of their much larger and yet similarly detailed paintings. An A5 drawing of an unnervingly hunched over gargoyle stands next to it’s much larger twin. On the adjacent wall a cardboard marionette of a pensive, blue and white clown looms before us as we settle into conversation.
You say your work serves as this recollection of your past, can you explain this? When I wrote that, I was working with a lot of old family photographs from when I lived in France, sort of collaging them together to create paintings that I think are like memory, where everything merges together in the way you remember it, it’s not very linear. So taking something from one period of my life and something from another, put them together to create this new retelling of a story. Stuff has shifted now from just being memories of my past, it’s become more about dream states and nightmares.
Do you think you're recalling a specific moment or you're working with more of an emotional feeling or residue of that moment? I think it’s the second option, more of a residue and the feelings behind those certain images, especially when I’m working with childhood photographs. I can’t remember a lot of it [my childhood] so I’m remembering through the photographs and the process of the painting. It could be a completely different retelling of what actually happened. Most of my memories from childhood aren’t accurate, in any sort of way, but they feel so strong.
Clowns, bowties and potentially you could call them ‘theatrics’ crop up in your work, why is this? Clowns are more recent and with the sort of colours I use people say it looks like I’m painting things under stage lights, like performers. When I moved to London, I started working at a bar called The Vaults, it’s a theatre space so a lot of people I work with are performers. I’ve always been quite jealous of it and I sort of wish I could do that, I guess this is my way of acting that out.
How does your sense of identity come into your work, and how does it interact with childhood memories? Sense of identity is an interesting one. When I look back at childhood images, I look very feminine, I’m a little girl. Whereas now, being non-binary, I don’t have that same connection to femininity. I quite like looking back and seeing myself then, how I used to dress, which was like a little boy. I don’t find it conflicting seeing that version of myself, I find it quite cool to see how it’s changed.
Do you think the performance aspect of you work is channeled from those childhood feelings? When I see those picture of a younger me, where I appear more feminine, I remember those feelings very well, it was kind of like a pretending, but not realising at that age what it was. I guess it’s just another form of putting on a mask, which links to the clowns. I like clown motifs and not knowing who’s behind the mask, I relate to them.
Are there any particular period of your life that you pull from? Yes, my time growing up in France, it was a very odd time in my life. I went to a French Catholic school where I couldn’t speak the language. I spent two and a half year being very quiet, but then I fell in love with art lessons, you could be good at that class without speaking French. A lot of my memory comes from that experience.
You’ve described exploring memories as ‘wandering though a maze,’ do you ever find moments of clarity in the maze? The wandering is more like the process which comes with painting. It’s deciding where to take it each day. And with that I’ll get sudden clarity of what direction to take the painting in. But a lot off the time I find myself stuck, just looking at them.
I feel like memories can be this deeply personal thing but simultaneously a shared experience we all have - have viewers of your work every seen something they recognise or responded in a surprising way? A lot of people want to understand what I’m painting and why, which more often than not I don’t have an answer to. Some people say they can’t read my paintings, especially the ones with two set of eyes, because they feel like they can’t get in, like they’re not allowed to. People get quite stumped.
Do you think memory is an endless source of inspiration for you or do you anticipate a shift to something else in the future? I see it as quite endless. I think the themes I explore are shifting. I don’t want to get bogged down by themes. I just want to make painting and I think it will just sort of go where it wants to go.