Graham Lister - ‘Barrier Works’

With connections and interconnections being ever-more limited, given the current situation comprising lockdowns and barriers to interactions, these painted works completed since 2018 have gained a new sense of significance. This is not to say that their importance or quality has altered, but rather that the ways that we consider structures that control movement, establish distance and deny access have changed. 

Painting for me is a process by which physical experience can be investigated, questioned and distilled. By ‘thinking through the activity of making’, the repeated lines, aesthetic aspects and specific colour ranges within various fencing types can come to light and be more carefully considered. 

Sometimes inviting, soft or even seemingly flexible, there are barriers which exert a sense of delineation, but continue to offer views between panels; over or through the structures themselves. Alternatively, there are more commanding constructions which contain physical areas, disavow passage and project a message to ‘keep your distance’.

In an era where the phrase ‘social distancing’ is common parlance, and where regimented lines for queuing are now the norm, the ways in which we see, understand and interact with controlled and demarked spaces is in a state of flux. ‘The Barrier Works’ which have been in development over recent years encapsulate these changes in status in the ways that readings of the works have shifted over time.

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