Mike Barrett: Here

Mike Barrett is an artist and a data scientist. He is an artist driven by a joy of making and sharing discoveries, large and small, made through tinkering with processes and materials, day-dreaming about what the world might be. His practice is an enquiry with the outputs being artefacts and tools of enquiry but not the sole objective of it. He has started a new project in response to the lockdown.

“There is a fluidity to my work that comes from intention revealing itself through process. I capture objects and images at the point of transition. Asemic scripts all but express what conventional languages fail to convey. Chance seeps in, even what looks like machine-generated binary code, on close inspection reveals wobbly hand-made features.

My quieter works have auratic aspects that aim to connect people with a sense of a spiritual presence and in others, a struggle can clearly be seen and felt, torn between summoning still quiet spaces for the resting of embattled lives and freely channeling the raw experiences of those lives. The questions I am considering include What is it to be mortal? And How do we rest within the fragility of our lives?

During the lockdown, I have been completing my daily solo walks around Brighton, stopping intermittently to chalk a circle and writing ‘here’ underneath. Many of them are fading and most will vanish with the first rain. The work, totalling over 1000 drawings, now exists mainly through documentation.

The work, simply called ‘Here’, feels like a defiant shout in the face of the virus. Where I chalk is still evolving but I choose the locations based on how they speak to me visually, following Jane Bennett’s concept of Vibrant Matter. I alternate between leaving the marks in unloved and hidden spaces and then scribing as big as I can in a highly visible space. I get little obsessions; street corners, posts, smooth-barked trees, junction boxes, shadows, etc.”

To view the Here project, visit @roxinante.

CuratorSpace are currently featuring articles by artists, curators and organisations who want to share their experiences of responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, whether that is artists using their practice as a way of exploring new boundaries of isolation, or as a way to connect more broadly with their communities. We are also interested in hearing from curators and organisations who are offering support to artists.

Contact us at louise@curatorspace.com to share your story. 

 

More news