JANE BARRY
'SOME OF THE THINGS I ALMOST SAW'
This collection of work began as a quick succession of photographs taken on my phone, held out the window of the moving car on a grey day. Fleeting, arbitrary, haphazard.
From these slightly skewed fragments of frozen time, they became works on paper. Most are monoprint based, hand-worked with graphite pencil and Indian ink, embellished with other press applied paper collage.
The running monochromatic theme throughout is not much more than an instinctive aspiration for a pause from working with colour. Perhaps fortuitously, for me, it is in keeping with the structure and mood of these images.
These works are cityscapes, an urban representation. They could be anywhere. My intention wasn’t to gravitate heavily towards an account of pre or post-earthquake Christchurch. Nearly six years on, we have relevant visual narration and reminder. They are however, a small nod to pieces of our city, snippets of its daily routine. A quiet reference to what it is now, to what it might become.
The one departure from subject in this collection is the triptych rendered onto canvas. A landscape. A break away from the city, because all we really need sometimes is just to get out of town.
As an artist, I have never been entirely comfortable with making great statement about my work or telling the viewer what they should see or feel. This said, my images will always have been born of an idea, will have evolved and followed a tenor. At heart, I like to make pictures- and If a picture speaks a thousand words, I like to let mine do most of the talking.
-Jane Barry.
