Louise Barrington. In Between Spaces
Louise Barrington returned home to Orkney after studying in London at the Slade School of Fine Art and Central Saint Martins. She has exhibited many times including at the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh (22 December 2019 – 30 January 2020). Her work is an emotional response to Orkney’s beautiful and dramatic terrain which inspired her palette. It deals with the quiet in-between times and places that border day & night, land & sea and the wonderful play of light found in these remote northern isles. The result, these gorgeous liminal land & seascapes.
The view from where Louise Barrington lives overlooks Scapa flow and is never still. It’s a continuous flow of movement, rhythm and changing patterns brought on by the weather and the seasons that permeate her artistic practice. “I will always be informed by it as I am part of it” she says.
Taner Soyler
Writer Edwin Muir stated of his youth in Orkney that it was ‘a place where there was no great distinction between ordinary and fabulous.’ This everyday ordinary/fabulous blur allows for wonderful artistic expression because the normal rules of optics and physics don’t apply.
It’s an in-between-ness that resonates with the Japanese concept of Ma because Orkney is an ‘edge’ environment that exists in the in-between spaces. In the aesthetic of Ma, negative space is given equal importance to actual space and this underpins the artist’s painting and sculptural work.
“It takes into consideration the space between two distinct markers of space and time. Observing the everyday, a knowing and unknowing we experience in our everyday ordinary/fabulous”
This poetry of Orkney inspires her use of colour, and the fluidity of her work aims to capture this characteristic of the landscape. The underlying energy that is prevalent in Orkney’s open spaces, the quality of light, especially at the ‘in-between’ times of twilight, dawn and dusk, have always greatly influenced her output.
In Between Spaces→
New work by Louise Barrington continues in the same vein. It’s a direct response to the landscape of her native Orkney in all its capricious moods: the quiet, beach- bleached pastels, flat calm mornings which, with little provocation can whip up into wild and tumultuous afternoons. She’s very much part of the landscape too. She now works from her studio at Wasps, Stromness.
In Between Spaces→
Awards
2020, Henry Moore Foundation: Artists Award Scheme
2020, Visual Artists and Craft Makers Award Scheme
2019, The Society of Scottish Artists Award
Invitation to exhibit at the next Annual Exhibition and two years membership .
Residences
2019,
Royal Drawing School, Dumfries House
Applied Arts Scotland, Nova Scotia, Canada
Solo Exhibitions
2019, St Magnus Festival, Orkney
2018, Briggait Project & Exhibition Space, Glasgow
2017, Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, Orkney
Selected Group Exhibitions
2020
The Royal Scottish Academy, Reduct, Edinburgh
Aberdeen Artists Society, Coming Home, Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museum, online
Applied Arts Scotland: SHIFT, Inverness Museum and Art gallery, Inverness
Utopia, Society of Scottish Artists, Kirkcudbright Galleries, Dumfries
Móti Collective, Northlight Gallery, Stromness, Orkney
2019
Society of Scottish Artists, 122nd Annual Exhibition, Royal Academy of Art, Edinburgh
Utopia, Society of Scottish Artists, Gracefields Art Centre, Dumfries
2018
Society of Scottish Artists, 121st Annual Exhibition, Royal Academy of Art, Edinburgh
