Separation in the Evening (a celestial blossom before the yellow house) is a ten foot-tall, metal sculpture by artist Sara Barker. The work not only brings sculpture to Jupiter Artland’s landscape, but also an artist’s impression of colour and light through painting – an interdisciplinary approach that is characteristic of Barker’s practice.

Separation in the Evening was an important step in Barker’s development towards large-scale artworks in outdoor settings. The artwork’s title is adapted from that of a 1922 painting by Paul Klee, alluding to the movement across mediums that is characteristic of Barker’s practice. The work’s gradation of colour is reminiscent of watercolour landscapes and Barker extends her palette with influences from Japanese painter Hiroshige.

‘A first encounter with the outdoors as a space to make art for takes a shift in perception, and a sensitive navigation of the sculptural pivots, topographical and geomantic landmarks unique to Jupiter Artland, especially because unlike a gallery environment, the landscape here is constantly evolving, plumping in summer to create flood-lit enclosures, and pockets of space, that reveal and illuminate themselves in different ways through the seasons.’ Sara Barker

Biography

Sara Barker (b. Manchester 1980) lives and works in Glasgow. Barker studied at the Glasgow School of Art, where she now lectures in Painting and Printmaking. Barker’s works take up the medium of painting in abstracted and playful ways. Her sculptural works inspire comparison with the post-war tradition of ‘drawing in space’ and with important artistic figures, such as Eva Hesse. Barker’s metal structures are delicately wrought, subtle and elusive in their effects, arising from her painterly treatment of them in acrylic, gouache, oil, or watercolour.

Barker often draws on the searching, experimental models found in modernist literature pioneered by female authors such as Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf. Her work explores interiority, both to interrogate the inner space of the subject, and to question how domestic space shapes subjectivity. To this end, Barker has noted the importance of the relationship between personal space and the concept of ‘room’. Barker’s work might be seen as taking up, at the start of the twenty-first century, the challenge of feeling-out the occupation or inhabitation of room space, using her finely tuned improvisational working methods.

Sara Barker’s work has been exhibited across the UK, including: Watch Movements, Patricia Fleming Gallery, Glasgow (2023); undo the knot, Cample Line, Dumfriesshire (2021); All Clouds are Clocks, All Clocks are Clouds, Leeds Art Gallery, (2020); Change the Setting, Fruitmarket, Edinburgh and IKON, Birmingham (2016). Permanent public sculptures include: Worlds of If, installed at the University of Leeds and Last of Light (3 Needles), Angel Court Piazza, London.