Ruth Barker

Born in Leeds, Ruth Barker (b. 1979) is a Glasgow-based artist who works with text and performance. Her practice brings moments of the contemporary quotidian together with the accumulated echoes of humanity’s oldest stories.

Often recomposing ancient myths through the language of her own unconscious associations and personal autobiography, Barker’s performance poems are hypnotic, ritualised events. Her words are recited with a concentrated focus that becomes by turns magical, claustrophobic, and cathartic. Voicing her private internal images as collectively shared archetypes becomes an experience towards the ritual understanding of self, gender, and mortality.

Recent projects include performance commissions for; Glasgow Women’s Library, Camden Arts Centre, London, Sils Projects, Rotterdam, Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art; Cartel Gallery, London ReMap festival, Athens, the Centre for Interdisciplinary Artefact Studies, Newcastle, and Machon Hamayim, Tel Aviv.

Projects

Contemporary Memorial // Staffin Community Trust

ATLAS Arts is working with the Staffin Community Trust (Urras An Taobh Sear) to produce a series of pilot commissions with a view to creating a contemporary memorial to acknowledge the nineteenth-century crofters’ land struggle in the Staffin area. A central aim of the commissions is for the artists to contribute to the awareness and understanding of the local community of the potentially positive impacts and benefits of a commissioned public artwork/contemporary memorial.

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Place of Pillars | Ruth Barker

Ruth Barker’s Place of Pillars (2016) was conceived as a contemporary dedication to the crofters’ uprising and commissioned as part of a wider collaboration between ATLAS Arts and the Staffin Community Trust to create a memorial to the uprising through local stories and shared memories. It was performed live in both Skye and in Edinburgh as part of the 2016 Edinburgh Art Festival, and is also available to listen to and download online.