Conscious thoughts and ‘self talk’ form the basis of artist Kathy Barber’s latest work.

Each painting is an outward expression of a thought, a phrase, a memory. These are places of the heart and mind revealed in a complex array of letters, like broken words, with the marks of the scribe looping across the canvas. They make for compelling reading. The language of the painter is visual not verbal; perhaps in Barber’s hands the paintings are visualisations of how her thoughts look.

“What is it that I’m thinking?” she may well be asking herself.

 And we may well ask ourselves, “But what does that mean?”

Single letters are often easy on the eye, but the overall complexity and juxtaposition of Barber’s marks and letters make it less about writing and more about the act of thinking itself. These are exquisite illusions, painted with an understanding of depth and structure, where the delicacy of the vision still feels like a spontaneous guesture, a free flowing thought.

The new work of Kathy Barber plays with light, but it’s not just through the fine layers of transparent paint; now it’s stripped, pared back, rubbed away, like her thoughts, revealing and concealing, open to interpretation. In this sense, her painting becomes a palimpsest of visible and the invisible, the cherished and the desired.