Oliver Raymond-Barker | from Natural Alchemy | pigmented ferric gum on paper
Oliver Raymond-Barker (b.1980) is a visual artist whose practice encompasses photography in its broadest sense, using analogue and digital media as well as camera-less methods of image making. Haptic experience is integral to the creation of work and combines with aesthetic and cultural concerns in the shaping of ideas.
For this exhibition Raymond-Barker is developing a new body of work that explores data
corruption; utilising compromised hardware and computer programming to manipulate digital
image files whilst also bringing elements of organic corruption into play.
Oliver Raymond-Barker|from the series Data (2014)
Work will also be on show from his most recent collaboration, Natural Alchemy, which involved
working with Dr. Chris Bryan of the University of Exeter’s Environment and Sustainability
Institute. The project is an exploration into process; using the unique properties of plants, rocks,
minerals and metals combined with the systems and organisms that surround them to create
artwork. Specific areas of research have included the latent potential of natural materials, the
innovative use of contaminated waste, the dynamic between autonomous and governed process
and the fusion of ancient and modern systems.
Oliver Raymond-Barker | Installation from Natural Alchemy at Back Lane West (2014)
It has been a great pleasure discovering Oliver’s work over the last year and very exciting to be working with an artist occupying the intersection of art and science, whose work goes beyond aesthetic referencing – in the Natural Alchemy series – into the realm of actually engaging with contemporary practical scientific research, in a physical way, to produce imagery that simultaneously ‘of now’ but as old as the medium itself.
Raymond-Barker is based in Cornwall and exhibits nationally. For further information please see: oliverraymondbarker.co.uk and http://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/naturalalchemy/
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