Sara Barker’s (b. 1980) solo exhibition captures a unique response to the site. In Watch Movements, Barker creates a careful dialogue with the Patricia Fleming Gallery’s new location, at a critical moment before the full renovation of the building. This exhibition marks the gallery’s move to Glasgow's south bank.

Manchester-born Sara Barker has built up a singular body of work since the early 2000s, occupying the space between painting and sculpture while consistently establishing relationships with language and poetics. Institutional solo shows have been held at Fruitmarket in Edinburgh, Ikon in Birmingham, Cample Line in Dumfries, The Baltic, Gateshead, and Leeds AA Museum. Over the last few years Barker has completed major outdoor works for Leeds Art Gallery, Clyde Place, Glasgow, and Bangkok, Government Art Commission.

Sara Barker’s work is characterised by its breadth of literary allusion—reading poetry and prose often spurs her creative processes. For this exhibition , the artist’s interest in exposing and framing apertures within a historic building is informed by ideas of time-space shifts and otherwordly and subterranean settings in science-fiction and fantasy, such as Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, and C.S. Lewis’s The Silver Chair. The motif of the clock or gauge, which recurs throughout the exhibition, speaks to this subtext, while also alluding to secret or in-between periods in the history and routines of the site, including its past use for underground raves.

Emphasising the importance of experiencing particular rooms as aesthetic wholes, Barker states: “one instance in which this happens in quite a theatrical way is in the former shower cubicle, a tiled area standing proud in Gallery One….I’m thinking of it as a large, unified artwork, a shadow-box or an aerial view of a vitrine. The painted and cleaned graffitied tiles respond to an oversized metal pole spanning the space. These are all constituent elements of the larger work.” In a sense, Barker converts Patricia Fleming Gallery into a single, multifaceted artwork. Its constituent materials and architectural features are customised and repurposed to become elements of an inhabitable sculpture, site-specific installation, or shadow-world of imagination.

The artist would like to thank Tim Facey and Tom Harrup.

Sara Barker: Watch Movements

9 June - 16 july 2023