Jo Barker Catalogue by pica pica

Jo Barker

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Tapestries

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I first encountered Jo Barker’s work at Collect, an event organised by the Crafts Council and hosted by the V&A for five very successful years. Showcasing the very best of international contemporary craft, Collect provided the opportunity for the Museum to access and acquire work created by some of the most energetic and innovative practitioners. ‘Dappled Circle Scarlet’ fig 4 was unanimously admired by the Acquisitions Panel, and subsequently acquired by the Department of Furniture, Textiles and Fashion. Barker’s work is technically astonishing; her use of colour challenging and exhilarating. Underpinned by her rigorous discipline of drawing, painting and collage, the translation of the painterly mark via warp and weft celebrates the sheer vibrancy of the medium. More than anything, Barker’s work is intensely desirable – it connects to the sensual, eliciting an emotional response which overrides a mere interest in technique. In this respect Barker’s work belongs as much in the domestic landscape as it does in an international museum of art and design. Sue Prichard Curator for Contemporary Textiles V&A Museum, London

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“It just looks too orange. It’s orange”………. “It’s definitely orange” Jo Barker is pulling back a cloth in her studio and sounds irritated – even appalled by this revealed section of her woven tapestry. Orangeness is clearly NOT what Jo is requiring of the luscious red laid before us. The baldness of the word ‘orange’ does not begin to describe the subtlety of hue to which Jo is referring, but the comment is important because it highlights the exacting standards this artist sets herself. Jo Barker has made it her life’s work to research the power of colour in woven tapestry design and making. Here we have sumptuous, sensuous colour in the hands of a master. The rigour of her approach has led to a deep intuitive understanding and pinpoint precision in the colour she demands of her woven tapestries. Colour is like a ball of fire cradled in an artist’s hands. It requires knowledge and a respect for its energies. It must be assuredly controlled without touch, yet be allowed to be free to dance and light the soul. In Jo’s hands the shades smoulder gently on the periphery, almost unseen waiting to be discovered…or flare and flash and sizzle, licking at the eye with their startling intensity, drawing us in to their vibrant unfolding drama. I have scribbled… ‘…deep raspberry plum burgundy mulberry bilberry blackness’ and ‘…aubergine burnt brown velvety wine’. Yet to describe colour in the medium of words is an inexact process. After all colour is ‘just an invention of the human mind responding to waves and particles that are moving in particular patterns through the universe’ (1.) and perceptions of it are by their nature distinctly personal. But perhaps the correlations with food are not far off the mark. These tapestries do ignite our senses – you can taste their colour.

The fact that these colours are in textile is what brings the particularity to Jo Barker’s work. It could be otherwise. Tapestry weaving is a slow, solid process; it can so easily be dull and inert. But by continuing to challenge herself with the question “how to make something static move” Jo has developed a unique and vital creative language. Colour, impregnated in thread, absorbs light. The physical intensity of Jo’s finely woven structure further emphasises this, as if pure pigment revealed in rock: matt, chalky or smooth shiny lush. The colour is dense, intense, drenched, saturated, soaked, positively sucked into the fabric. “I was always drawing as a child” she recalls. And it has continued. Books with painted swathes of colour explored spontaneously and emotionally, pouring from their pages. Sketches studying light, shade, shadow and mark, drawn lines from natural forms and images collected from travels. Designs investigated on the computer and sensibilities honed through years of looking and thinking. All potent inquiry, but it’s the mysterious ‘other’ of the subconscious, that ellusive place where the most profound ideas occur, that artists desire. As Jo puts it “you look at and focus…but it’s the thing over there on the edge of your vision…the marginal, edgy things that you are after…the thinking from the back of the head”. In recent tapestries Jo’s designing has become both sparer and increasingly assured. These powerful works bathe and hold the viewer in their energy field; the deep breath of their colour, that exquisitely specific highly attuned colour, is given space to sing…space to be itself. As we leave the studio Jo turns and says it all: “I don’t have words. It’s not about words...it’s it...it’s itself.” Sue Lawty November 2008

1. Finlay, Colour: Travels Through the Paintbox p9.

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