“In her sculptures Barbara explores the themes of her paintings in another dimension, working with scraps and rags of material (particularly muslin), old bandages and used paper with plaster of Paris, wallpaper glue and rabbit skin glue, using tree branches, stones and her own body as molds and covering them as though the materials were bandages to create curious forms which evoke vestiges, shells, fossils and chrysalides… She tends to present them in Perspex boxes like museum pieces, elevating them to an iconic status and transmitting poetically, metaphorically life’s fragility”. Marita Becerra
Whilst I tend to work quite frenetically and compulsively on my paintings it is in my sculptures, my “relics” and my bowls or nests that I tend to seek refuge in moments of uncertainty and blockage. However I am usually working on something both in 2 and 3 dimensions at the same time and there is a constant dialogue and tension between the two with the same preoccupations returning again and again.
Many of my sculptures start their life as a mixture of old bits of muslin used when my children were babies, bits of bandages, scraps of old sketches and dried up vegetation from the garden, all boiled up in a mixture with onion skins which dye them an delicate earthy, fleshy colour, in a process that seems to be a strange travesty of the traditional feminine labours of cooking and curing. After molding, gluing and stitching they end up in numbered boxes like the endless relics in the sort of traditional museum I remember visiting as a child. Perhaps there is nothing so new about that but for me it´s a curiously compelling process. See more under recent work
