Barry Parker

I try to combine physical, emotional and psychological elements of real experience in my sculpture, to communicate a feeling or attitude about that experience. Many of the forms I construct have their basis in the physical world but because the work is about my feeling toward those forms more than the forms themselves, they are distorted and transformed. They are not meant to be recognized and named, but to be felt and intuitively experienced.

                     

My sculptures are constructed of hammered and formed bronze sheet which are then welded together to form the finished work. To this end, the process makes a very important contribution to the total visual result. The acts of heating, hammering and welding create a surface that appears aged and stressed.

                     

I allow the welds to remain visible because they can be read almost like scars, which in a sense, they are; places where the metal has healed together. These elements can have a psychological counterpart which I feel adds to the pathos of the form.

                     

Travel has provided source and inspiration for many of my works. Most recently they draw on stone markers of Japan that have so much strength and pathos in their simplicity, and on a particular image of a crow with a ring in its beak, used by Prince Mathias, the Hungarian Renaissance prince as his personal symbol.

                     

In looking deeper than the charming folk tales about the reason for this particular symbol, I find it to be one that is heavy with meaning in relation to love, commitment and relationships. and have infused some of my works with forms derived from it.

                     

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