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Ali Barker is a modern summary artist dependent in Liverpool. She was the winner of Merseytravel’s ‘Art on the Network’ opposition in 2011, with two of her skyline murals of Liverpool and Wirral permanently installed on the panelling at either end of the Queensway (Birkenhead) Tunnel. She held her initially solo present ‘Four-Dimensional Colour’ in 2016, and concluded her MA in Fantastic Art in 2019.


Ali is effective with a preset palette of twelve colors to signify the colors she perceives through her ordeals of the phenomenon of audio-colour synaesthesia – when listening to music, she perceives each individual take note of the musical scale as a particular colour. She is inspired and enthusiastic by these ordeals, drawing on them and her musical qualifications (she plays the violin and the viola) to make her paintings. Beginning from her perceptions although listening to certain parts and/or from the composed audio, her method interprets melodies and excerpts into vibrant paintings, ranging from gestural works to geometric patterns.

Hello Ali, many thanks so considerably for having the time to discuss to us, for starters could you inform us a minimal little bit about your journey as an artist?

Sure, of study course. My creative journey is a tiny unconventional, as I didn’t study art at college – I had to pick possibly artwork or tunes to in good shape in with 3 science topics, so I selected songs! My first degree and profession had been science-based, but, in my spare time, I ongoing to make artwork and take a look at galleries and exhibitions, as effectively as perform in nearby orchestras.

In 2009 I resolved to examine A-degree art portion-time, which is when I started off to take a look at the connections involving songs and artwork. A several several years later on, after 20 years in my past career, I left that behind to aim on my artwork. I threw myself into learning Foundation Artwork and Style for a yr, which enabled me to experiment with connecting my synaesthesia, my musical qualifications, and my artwork. Right after a few of years of creating my observe on my have, I studied part-time for a follow-centered MA in Good Artwork, which delivered a framework to recognize what is most essential to me in my observe: my private activities of synaesthesia and of playing and listening to music, and the procedures I use to develop my work.


Your work is closely tied to your practical experience of synaesthesia when listening to new music. How do the seems translate into colors and shapes, is it rather literal to you or do you get a thing various from every unique piece of audio?

The colors I understand are always the exact same for certain notes of the musical scale and they are the setting up stage for my artworks. What I ‘see’ is difficult to explain in phrases (several synaesthetes find it complicated to describe their encounters) but could be explained as fleeting perceptions of bright colours in my mind’s eye. I really do not take into account my synaesthesia to be a ‘condition’, somewhat an ‘addition’ to my daily everyday living. The designs and styles in my operate are not literal reproductions of my encounters I draw upon my musical history and use the distinct colours I perceive as the stimulus for my artworks in reaction to specific items of music. I am typically motivated by the music I am rehearsing/accomplishing, as nicely as the huge array of tunes I hear to, or tunes picked out by a customer for a fee.

The process I make use of to produce and build the operate tends to involve two means of doing the job, which I refer to as expressive and geometric. The expressive functions are spontaneous, involving listening to the new music and putting down paint in the colors perceived, layering the different colored marks and/or manipulating the paint on the surface in reaction to the shape or experience of the songs. In contrast, the geometric is effective can choose months or months to produce via drawings and sketches ahead of currently being executed as a last portray. These translational paintings use the colours I perceive in geometric designs representing excerpts or melodies from the created tunes. Lately my geometric functions (such as the two Mahler paintings in my Cass Art exhibition) have been exploring the visual interweaving of two or more musical themes.


You have stated your do the job is quite significantly system-pushed, but are there any artists or movements that you have identified to be an impact on your art apply?

It was a painting by Wassily Kandinsky (also thought to have been a synaesthete) that to start with sparked my desire in investigating the connections in between tunes and art: he painted Impact III (Live performance) in 1911 as his reaction to listening to a live performance of new songs by the composer Arnold Schoenberg. It was this research for the duration of my A-amount scientific tests which served me to have an understanding of that my experiences were being synaesthesia, and to get started to set down the colors I understand in paint and determine my musical colour scale. I assume in the early phases of developing my practice, numerous early 20th century artists affected my function, together with Kandinsky, Paul Klee (also a violinist), and the Australian artist Roy de Maistre (who experimented with translating total items of tunes into colour from 1919 onwards). Imagining about additional contemporary artists, Bridget Riley’s sequences of colored stripes, and the large, colourful paintings of the late John Hoyland (also born in Sheffield!) have a lot more frequently influenced my paintings. Gerhard Richter’s geometric designs of coloured squares, as effectively as his manipulation of paint on a floor, have also influenced the two of my ways of doing the job – equally, I really don’t feel I want to restrict myself to only performing in one particular way, I tend to change in between the two for durations of time.


What sorts of components would you say are integral to your function?

I use particular paint colours, typically straight from the tube to hold them clean and vivid – my perceptions of colour are bright, so I try out to reproduce the colours as carefully as achievable and restrict applying the duller colors of combined paint. 1 colour I understand I would describe as a shimmering crimson-brown, so after much experimentation, I settled on utilizing copper paint to symbolize that be aware. I generally use Liquitex paints, as they can present me with the assortment of precise colors I need to have – my go-to paint is Soft Entire body, but I have also made use of their Spray Paint, Acrylic Ink, and Acrylic Gouache, as effectively as a variety of their Experienced mediums to generate the consistency and translucency/opacity I want for distinctive pieces. When doing work on canvas, durable stretcher bars are critical – the Cass Artwork stretcher bars work very well for me, appear in a vast assortment of dimensions, are effortless to set alongside one another and are robust plenty of not to warp, which is essential for my geometric perform!


Your murals for the Art on the Network competition are an legendary aspect of the Merseyside landscape. What is it like to have your get the job done as a long term public artwork set up?

I was a bit overcome when I won the competition! It was all through my component-time A-amount research, just before I’d taken the plunge to leave my preceding profession. My electronic designs were utilised by the firm who made all the panels for the tunnel refurbishment task they monitor-printed and fired the colors in vitreous enamel on to the stainless-steel supports. They ended up set up in excess of ten many years ago but should last a long time. My original Liverpool Composition and Wirral Composition paintings are, understandably, not for sale, but are even now available as constrained-version prints. I dwell on the Liverpool side of the Mersey, but have numerous connections to Wirral, particularly through new music, so I get to travel previous my artwork fairly on a regular basis!

Ultimately, what is in shop for you for the rest of 2022? Nearly anything you can let us in on?

In October, I will be Artist in Residence for the Wirral Arts Festival 2022. I’ll be performing with an orchestra and some other musical teams who are accomplishing at the pageant, producing artwork in reaction to some of the parts they approach to participate in in their concert events and then displaying the finished paintings at the live shows. In reality, some of the functions on paper in my existing exhibition at Cass Art Liverpool have been made throughout last year’s festival.

If not, I am content to be largely producing new operate this year, reflecting on and continuing from tips that arose from my six-week solo exhibition and residency project in an artist-led place in Liverpool final summertime. I am also commencing to appear in the direction of some possible exhibition options in 2023 and 2024. There are generally group exhibitions to implement for all over the calendar year, so I’ll see what else will come up!

Emotion Impressed?



Ali’s exhibition ‘Musicals to Mahler’ is at Cass Artwork Liverpool right up until 17th June 2022. You can see extra of Ali’s function on her website alibarker.com Be absolutely sure to follow her on Facebook and Instagram @alibarkerart

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