Artist Interview: Ali Barker | Cass Art
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Ali Barker is a present-day abstract artist dependent in Liverpool. She was the winner of Merseytravel’s ‘Art on the Network’ opposition in 2011, with two of her skyline murals of Liverpool and Wirral completely mounted on the panelling at both conclusion of the Queensway (Birkenhead) Tunnel. She held her 1st solo show ‘Four-Dimensional Colour’ in 2016, and done her MA in Fine Artwork in 2019.


Ali functions with a preset palette of twelve colors to represent the colours she perceives by way of her activities of the phenomenon of sound-color synaesthesia – when listening to new music, she perceives each and every observe of the musical scale as a particular colour. She is encouraged and enthusiastic by these encounters, drawing upon them and her musical background (she performs the violin and the viola) to create her paintings. Beginning from her perceptions whilst listening to particular parts and/or from the composed tunes, her approach interprets melodies and excerpts into colourful paintings, ranging from gestural performs to geometric styles.

Hi Ali, many thanks so significantly for taking the time to discuss to us, for starters could you notify us a very little little bit about your journey as an artist?

Sure, of course. My creative journey is a minor unconventional, as I did not research artwork at university – I experienced to choose possibly art or audio to in good shape in with three science topics, so I selected songs! My 1st degree and profession were science-based mostly, but, in my spare time, I ongoing to make artwork and go to galleries and exhibitions, as effectively as play in neighborhood orchestras.

In 2009 I resolved to examine A-level art section-time, which is when I begun to take a look at the connections involving songs and artwork. A handful of several years later on, immediately after 20 years in my earlier profession, I remaining that driving to concentration on my artwork. I threw myself into studying Foundation Art and Style for a calendar year, which enabled me to experiment with connecting my synaesthesia, my musical track record, and my artwork. Immediately after a pair of yrs of producing my exercise on my own, I analyzed portion-time for a follow-dependent MA in High-quality Art, which delivered a framework to have an understanding of what is most critical to me in my follow: my personal ordeals of synaesthesia and of actively playing and listening to new music, and the procedures I use to generate my work.


Your get the job done is closely tied to your working experience of synaesthesia when listening to tunes. How do the seems translate into colours and shapes, is it quite literal to you or do you get some thing diverse from every single various piece of new music?

The colors I understand are normally the identical for specific notes of the musical scale and they are the commencing point for my artworks. What I ‘see’ is tricky to explain in phrases (several synaesthetes discover it tricky to explain their activities) but could be explained as fleeting perceptions of brilliant colors in my mind’s eye. I never think about my synaesthesia to be a ‘condition’, rather an ‘addition’ to my every day everyday living. The patterns and styles in my work are not literal reproductions of my ordeals I attract upon my musical qualifications and use the certain colors I perceive as the stimulus for my artworks in reaction to particular parts of songs. I am normally influenced by the songs I am rehearsing/executing, as nicely as the extensive variety of songs I pay attention to, or new music decided on by a client for a fee.

The approach I make use of to acquire and build the get the job done tends to contain two means of working, which I refer to as expressive and geometric. The expressive works are spontaneous, involving listening to the music and putting down paint in the colours perceived, layering the distinctive coloured marks and/or manipulating the paint on the floor in reaction to the form or come to feel of the songs. In contrast, the geometric is effective can get months or months to develop as a result of drawings and sketches before remaining executed as a remaining portray. These translational paintings use the colours I understand in geometric styles symbolizing excerpts or melodies from the penned audio. Not too long ago my geometric functions (these types of as the two Mahler paintings in my Cass Art exhibition) have been checking out the visual interweaving of two or additional musical themes.


You have reported your get the job done is incredibly substantially process-pushed, but are there any artists or actions that you have located to be an impact on your artwork apply?

It was a portray by Wassily Kandinsky (also thought to have been a synaesthete) that 1st sparked my interest in researching the connections amongst audio and artwork: he painted Effect III (Concert) in 1911 as his response to listening to a concert of new tunes by the composer Arnold Schoenberg. It was this research during my A-stage experiments which aided me to fully grasp that my encounters were being synaesthesia, and to begin to place down the colours I understand in paint and determine my musical colour scale. I believe in the early phases of building my practice, many early 20th century artists motivated my perform, like Kandinsky, Paul Klee (also a violinist), and the Australian artist Roy de Maistre (who experimented with translating complete pieces of songs into color from 1919 onwards). Contemplating about a lot more modern day artists, Bridget Riley’s sequences of coloured stripes, and the large, colourful paintings of the late John Hoyland (also born in Sheffield!) have extra frequently motivated my paintings. Gerhard Richter’s geometric styles of colored squares, as properly as his manipulation of paint on a floor, have also affected both of my techniques of performing – in the same way, I really don’t come to feel I want to restrict myself to only doing the job in 1 way, I are likely to change between the two for intervals of time.


What sorts of resources would you say are integral to your do the job?

I use particular paint colours, mostly straight from the tube to continue to keep them clean and vibrant – my perceptions of colour are shiny, so I attempt to reproduce the colours as intently as possible and limit using the duller colors of mixed paint. Just one colour I perceive I would describe as a shimmering red-brown, so soon after much experimentation, I settled on utilizing copper paint to signify that observe. I predominantly use Liquitex paints, as they can provide me with the range of certain colours I require – my go-to paint is Delicate System, but I have also utilized their Spray Paint, Acrylic Ink, and Acrylic Gouache, as properly as a range of their Experienced mediums to create the consistency and translucency/opacity I want for various items. When functioning on canvas, strong stretcher bars are essential – the Cass Art stretcher bars work well for me, appear in a huge assortment of sizes, are effortless to put alongside one another and are sturdy plenty of not to warp, which is vital for my geometric function!


Your murals for the Art on the Network levels of competition are an legendary aspect of the Merseyside landscape. What is it like to have your do the job as a permanent community artwork installation?

I was a little bit overwhelmed when I won the competition! It was during my portion-time A-degree scientific tests, in advance of I’d taken the plunge to go away my preceding vocation. My electronic layouts have been employed by the enterprise who made all the panels for the tunnel refurbishment task they display screen-printed and fired the colours in vitreous enamel onto the stainless-steel supports. They had been put in over ten many years ago but should past a prolonged time. My original Liverpool Composition and Wirral Composition paintings are, understandably, not for sale, but are still offered as limited-version prints. I are living on the Liverpool facet of the Mersey, but have quite a few connections to Wirral, particularly by audio, so I get to vacation previous my artwork really on a regular basis!

Finally, what is in store for you for the rest of 2022? Nearly anything you can allow us in on?

In Oct, I will be Artist in Home for the Wirral Arts Competition 2022. I’ll be doing the job with an orchestra and some other musical groups who are accomplishing at the competition, earning artwork in response to some of the parts they approach to enjoy in their live shows and then displaying the completed paintings at the concert events. In point, some of the works on paper in my present-day exhibition at Cass Art Liverpool have been made in the course of last year’s pageant.

In any other case, I am content to be primarily producing new perform this calendar year, reflecting on and continuing from ideas that arose from my six-7 days solo exhibition and residency challenge in an artist-led house in Liverpool past summer time. I am also setting up to appear toward some prospective exhibition options in 2023 and 2024. There are usually team exhibitions to use for through the calendar year, so I’ll see what else will come up!

Emotion Encouraged?



Ali’s exhibition ‘Musicals to Mahler’ is at Cass Art Liverpool until finally 17th June 2022. You can see a lot more of Ali’s get the job done on her website alibarker.com Be certain to adhere to her on Facebook and Instagram @alibarkerart

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