Portable Stones

Camden Arts Centre premiered Orla Barry’s new commissioned video work Portable Stones (2005) in the UK. Spoken word and evocative video direction combine to create her uniquely voiced art which she has described as “a wall of words built from images, and a wall of images built from words”. Portable Stones is physically constructed like a poem, without linear narrative but woven like a web of associative and intimately intense reflections and voices. As with her earlier videos, it develops a fragmented frame of reference around her texts arising from a particular stream-of-consciousness style.

Born in Ireland, Barry explores the semantics of her mother tongue, its iconography and the problems of communication using symbols of togetherness and aloneness. A girl escapes from the city to camp in an abandoned graveyard. In the ensuing silence she becomes involved in a linguistic dream world. She hears voices that speak of not speaking. Memory, fantasy and imagination become interwoven with one another. The continuous use of voice-over and monologue allows Barry to bring an enclosed feeling to the most open of spaces, the sea, to which she ascribes human qualities, so that it talks, cries, caresses and ultimately seduces.

An artist’s book by Orla Barry has been published by S.M.A.K., Ghent in collaboration with Camden Art Cetnre and Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin.