Joan Barker

Artist Statement

I resist the tradition of landscape as timeless and complete. Instead, the landscape becomes fragmented and layered, reflecting contemporary experiences of place--mediated by technology, shaped by personal narrative and constantly shifting. The combination of photography with painting and drawing allows the work to sit between documentation and imagination, reinforcing the idea that landscapes are not simply seen, but interpreted and reconstructed. The mixed media invites viewers to consider how landscapes are shaped not only by geography but also perception, time and the way images are constructed and consumed.

My intervention is sometimes spare with only gestural lines that carry the photographs mood, motion and energy beyond its physical edge. A narrow blade of grass or a breeze rippling across the water’s surface move beyond the dictates of aspect ratio framing. In that sense, the marks feel temporal, like an exhaled breath dissolving the boundary between inside and outside, image and world.

The more detailed marks that fill the border function as a parallel visual language. For example, forest eco systems are among the most intricate on earth characterized by dense, multi-layered interconnected communities of living organisms. Complexity arises from biodiversity. By drawing beyond the photograph, I aim push the image outward as I frame and interpret it.

My work demonstrates how photographic imagery can remain central while being questioned and transformed between mechanical image-making intuitive mark-making. Through this process, the image shifts from documentation to dialogue creating a tension between immediacy and reflection: one pulls the photograph into a lived space, while the other pulls it into a system of signs. The image is both unleashed and interpreted at the same time. Insight emerges not from clarity alone, but from distortion and ambiguity, where emotion reshapes perception and the landscape reflects an inner terrain as much an external one.