Katrina Barber - Artist

'For HERE&NOW13 Katrina Barber developed Light series, a light installation develped from a series of watercolour of the same name, which repositions and interrogates the standard sensorial experience and exchange of communictaion.  Barber's works are informed by a past isolation and an innate need to communicate with both her immediate and outside world.  Her paintings, drawings and watercolours are self-reflective transient feelings, which at times are confronting and contradictory to the artist's outer persona.

Light series bears down on the viewer, demanding space and acknowledgement without expecting any reciprocity, as it strives to communicate that which the artist cannot verbalise - a plethora of joy, happiness, disappointment, annoyance and sadness.

Barber's pieces rest powerfully within the concept of art as a communicative tool, as a visual language in its own right.  Her works serve a purpose, they allow her a communication pathway.  They become the means by which a distinct identity and a connection to society are formed, a way of bypassing silence.  Light series foregrounds the language of communication and engagement as multi-sensory, destabilising audiences by placing them in a position the artist herself traditionally occupies, a space where they are unable to "talk back".'

Katherine Wilkinson,'HERE&NOW13', Here & Now 13 - eleven contemporary Western Australian artists, ex. cat., p59