Ruth Barker: Circle Work

Circle Work is Ruth Barker’s most ambitious performance to date, and has been developed specifically for CCA’s Theatre. A complex and immersive experience, it features spoken word, installation, and costume.

Ruth Barker is a Glasgow-based visual artist specialising in writing and performance. Her spoken word performance works, often involving substantial literary or poetic monologues that the artist scripts herself, are known for their hypnotic intensity. With multilayered reference points including ancient myths, personal autobiography, and daily ephemera, Barker’s words have a concentrated focus that is magical, and interrogative. Her work exists as radio broadcasts, live performance, text-based work, and moving image fragments.

Circle Work will extend Barker’s interest in autobiography, feminist writing practice, and unconscious associations, through a new work that adopts the form of a provisional séance. By turns thoughtful, engrossing, hypnotic, or darkly humorous, Circle Work is a preternatural metaphysical experience. The performance will reveal unexpected connections, and slivers of strange finitude. The work will be performed once only at CCA, and has been devised for a limited number of audience members, so early booking is advised.

Ruth Barker’s recent projects include exhibitions and performance commissions for Siobhan Davies Dance, London; Radiophrenia (Glasgow); Resonance FM (London); Camden Arts Centre (London); Sils Projects (Rotterdam); Glasgow International festival of Visual Art; Cartel Gallery, (London); ReMap festival (Athens); the Centre for Interdisciplinary Artefact Studies (Newcastle); and Machon Hamayim (Tel Aviv). She is currently working on a large-scale site specific performance for the Freud Museum, London.

Suitable for ages 15+