BARBARA BEYER

North House Gallery is delighted to present this exhibition of sculpture and drawings by the energetic London based artist Barbara Beyer. Since her first show here in early 2022, entitled unterwegs, she has produced a large, varied, yet coherent, body of work through her unconventional experiments with materials and making.

She is drawn to minimal and archaic forms, natural and manmade, and the evocative potential of the sculptural object. Her work addresses and celebrates but also questions the consequences of our fundamental ability to shape, change and make. Traces of process remain and material qualities and potential become visible and form an essential part of the work.

From the man and mountain series in adobe and slate and from the many sketches and maquettes of loaded boat shapes, a response to global events in 2020, evolved a variety of boat shapes of which the large capacity 1 was the first. "Capacity (2023) evokes the dynamic of boats but the material elements and construction method recall the sturdiness of houses and solid ground. The boat is made of wood and adobe, filled with builders’ foam and roofed with recycled slate roof tiles. More tiles ambiguously perform as load, obstacle, protection, shelter and environment on and around the main form." (BB)

The give and take series of blue cubes evolved out of making and disrupting works in stoneware, drilling and cutting into forms and applying the extracted material elsewhere on the piece, dropping and otherwise interfering with them to make the history and resolution of the making apparent. Stoneware vessels with gouged grooves and extracted re-applied rods showing black against the orange slip, are similarly called cut and paste.

Reduction firing, familiar in ceramic processes, lends itself also to making charcoal, the most basic of drawing materials. The burnt black twigs are beautiful in the vessels in which they were fired and the installation stepping stone bridges, but the home made charcoal has also been used in two series of large drawings, after walking on Dartmoor and one by one. Smaller drawings of rudimentary dwellings in charcoal and clay complete the exhibition and look like a stepping stone to future work.

Barbara Beyer was born in Germany, studied sculpture with Prof Ansgar Nierhoff at Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz from 1993 to 1997. She had a studio at the Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop from 1998 to 2002, when she moved to London. She has extensive experience in public engagement and participatory artwork, has exhibited nationally and internationally and collaborated on public commissions in Switzerland, Norway and the UK. She is a member of the Royal Society of Sculptors, The London Group and a Studio Member at Rochester Square Ceramics in Camden. Since showing at North House Gallery in 2022 she has participated in at least fifteen group exhibitions throughout the UK.