This was Anna Barriball's first exhibition at the Ingleby Gallery and her first solo show in Scotland. She worked closely with the gallery spaces to create a significant body of new work for our exhibition.
Barriball's work inhabits a fluid territory, somewhere betwixt and between the two disciplines of drawing and sculpture. Hers is an exquisitely patient and poetic process as she seeks, or waits, for the perfect collision of object and idea and medium. Heavy graphite rubbings of doors, windows and walls laboriously explore her immediate world and reveal a quiet beauty in our everyday surroundings whilst playfully negating their usual function. The graphite tracings of 'Untitled (Back Door)' describe a large glass pane, placed on the wall exactly where the doorframe should offer substance and support, and a way in or out. Such visual puns continue in the series 'Windows', in which found photographs of buildings are re-presented with the lightest touch - the images are framed but entirely obscured by window-mounts cut to reveal just one isolated window looking out, and for us to peer into. In another new work, 'Escape II', a trail of found ribbons is knotted together and suspended from the ceiling, trailing down onto the floorboards. Transformed from useless scraps found in flea markets, they become a curiously substantial work which animates the space around it, and seems to defy gravity, suggesting perhaps we really could clamber up and away.