Visual Arts
Orla Barry
Orla Barry (b. 1969) produces crossover artworks that blend text, narrative, performance, and visual art, inhabiting the space between theatre and gallery. Her work is strongly poetic and lyrical, crossing a wide variety of media, evoking non-linear narratives, and dealing with themes such as linguistic intoxication, the rural and more recently our interdependence and disconnection from the natural environment. Barry’s work is based on real life experience as a research practice and uses techniques informed by auto-ethnography. Barry emigrated in the early 90’s and lived for 16 years in Brussels. Since 2007 she lives rural Wexford where alongside her studio, she runs a successful flock of pedigree Lleyn sheep. Her work deals with the physicality and poetics of oral language drawing on the tensions between being a female artist and a farmer in rural Ireland.
In 1999 Barry was nominated for the Glen Dimplex award at IMMA and later in 2006 she had a solo show there called Portable Stones and Other Works. For the 20 years of IMMA in 2011 her performance ‘The Scavengers Daughters’ was shown. More recently she has also shown at the 39th EVA International, RHA, Crawford, TBG+S, Mothers Tank Station. She has also shown and performed in many of the major institutions in the UK and Europe such as Tate Modern, The South London Gallery, Camden Arts Center and Gasworks. SMAK Gent, Museum M Leuven, MuZEE, Ostend, Bozar & Argos, Centre for Art and Media Brussels and Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon. Her performance work has also been programmed at the Project Arts Center, Dublin Theatre Festival, Cork Mid-Summer Festival, TAZ Ostend, KAAI Theatre Brussels, STUK, Leuven de Appel & Frascati, Amsterdam. She also lectures in sculpture and expanded practices at SETU.
In 2023 the filmmaker Cara Holmes won Best Documentary at Dublin International Film Festival for her portrait of Orla Barry for which Barry collaborated to write the script. The judges said: “Stylish, interesting, challenging in its form, ‘Notes from Sheepland’ is a very well-crafted cinematic documentary. As well as being a clever and creative treatment of its subject, this is a film that brims with freshness and life. The film’s final line by Barry ‘May we live to keep you alive’ resonated powerfully with the jury.”
http://orlabarry.be/