Anna Barriball: New Drawings

2 Feb - 14 Mar 2024 Golden Square

Light, memory and the history of photography are some of the abiding themes in this exhibition which brings together several new bodies of work and a moving image piece. These collectively examine the effect of light as it passes through and around objects, casting fleeting shadows and evoking distinct atmospheres. Barriball is interested in trying to capture or document such moments and reflections in her drawings, conscious too of the physicality of the materials she employs.
Studio window (blue fade), 2023–24
Windows and other kinds of thresholds have been a recurring theme in Barriball’s work, depicting and inhabiting apertures and in-between spaces which are often rendered as one-to-one scale drawings. Here she investigates the overlaps and boundaries between drawing, photography and sculpture in pieces based on the large windows of the Victorian building where she has her studio.

Constructed from layers of pastel-dusted, wax-coated paper, Studio window (blue fade) is one of the artist’s largest drawings. The blue directly references early cyanotype and photogram processes where an item is placed onto photographic paper and exposed to light. Through this layering, Barriball recreates the effect of a cyanotype print, capturing each glass pane, allowing the intensity of the image to blur and fade, as if a photographic process has faltered. No physicality of the studio window remains but rather a ghostly preservation; an impression left.
Afterimage, 2021
For this exhibition Barriball has developed a series of what she calls hand-held drawings, relating in size to polaroids. Their creation is quite different to the larger work, as is the resulting surface quality. While the paper is again coated with powdered pastel, it then is dipped into molten wax, transforming it into a smooth, semi-translucent object marked in places by the artist’s own fingerprints.

Developed over the course of the 2021 pandemic, Afterimage marks Barriball’s transition into working on a smaller scale which she has described as an act of ‘inward looking’. The work consists of seven drawings that capture the play of shadows on the wall of the artist’s childhood bedroom, intensifying and fading across the sequence, mirroring the pattern of light as the sun emerges and recedes behind clouds. Barriball describes these smaller works as kind of handmade photographs and while making them she was thinking about photographic developing processes, such as the gradual revelation of a polaroid image.
The sun (Rosa's room), 2024
The colour in Afterimage is a reference to the effect experienced when one faces the sun with closed eyes, creating an internal image. Accompanying the series is a new moving image work titled The sun (Rosa’s room) documenting the play of shadows on another wall in another childhood home – that of the artist’s daughter.
Window (blue twilight), 2023
Window (blue twilight) has been made by applying differing hues of blue in a gentle gradation from the top of the drawing to bottom to achieve an intense sense of depth. The resulting work has a different feeling to the others in the series and evokes a photographic negative, or the eerie beauty of the light just before the sun rises or sets.
Seascape II, 2022
The series Seascape I–VI developed out of experimentation with layering materials. Over the course of two years, the artist has combined her practices working in graphite and wax, allowing chance to guide the process.

Here she uses three layers of paper: the bottom consists of a block of carefully applied graphite powder with the top section cut away to create a defined horizon line and sense of space beyond. On the surface sits two layers of pastel-dusted waxed paper – one yellow, the other blue.
Sunlight (yellow) and Sunlight (orange), 2023
For Barriball, working with wax creates a sense of illumination or ‘drawing with light’ due to the transformation that the paper undergoes, blending the pigment into smooth semi-translucent surface that varies between each piece, capturing the ever-changing weather or time of day.
'I like the idea of drawing with light and this, together with the fades I have made with dusted powdered pastel, give another way of attempting to draw time.'
Amber (tree shadow) I–V, 2023
The series Amber (tree shadow) documents the ever-changing nature of shadows. Each individual work can consist of up to five pieces of waxed paper, layered on top of graphite drawings of tree shadows to create a sense of preservation or entrapment. The artist has likened this to the way in which insects and organic matter are held in suspension in tree resin, transformed into something beautiful and eternal.
- Amber (tree shadow) V, 2023
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Photography: Ben Westoby

Videography: Jon Lowe

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Anna Barriball: New Drawings

Photography: Ben Westoby

Videography: Jon Lowe

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