Ciara Barker is a multidisciplinary artist based in Limerick, Ireland. After graduating from Limerick School of Art and Design in 2017, Barker co-founded Spacecraft Artists’ Studios and was a Director there for two years. In 2019, she was awarded an Individual Arts Bursary and a Grants Under the Arts Act Award by Limerick City and County Council. In the same year, she exhibited in a two-person exhibition at 126 Gallery as part of the Galway International Arts Festival. As a long-term Artist-in-Residence at Ormston House, Barker has been commissioned to develop a new large-scale installation for their upcoming artistic programme. She is currently also undertaking a higher diploma in Interaction Design at Dublin City University.
Barker is particularly drawn to refraction and distortion of light as a way to open up the complexity of the seemingly one-dimensional. She uses reflective and transparent materials to distort space and the bodies and images within it. This is a means to explore the illusory nature of self-image and the fallibility of socially-constructed divides. In her practice she wishes to embrace the in-betweens of such divides. Her hope is to create intuitive spaces that disengage us from oversimplified identity attachments and promote rebellious acceptance, with room for complexities and contradictions.
Independent artist
