I work with objects – for example a piano, a train, a glass cup, a car or a collection of stones or things that float. The objects become anthropomorphic metaphors for some kind of evidence of human presence. The processes I use come out of the ‘blind gap’ inherent in drawing.
Pliney the Elder states the origin of drawing as when Butades traces the shadow of her departing lover on the wall, but she isn’t looking at him, she is looking at his shadow. There is always a gap in drawing; you can’t look at the subject and the mark on the page at the same time.
I try and close this gap in drawing by using direct contact, infiltrating vision with touch. For example negative photograms made by putting the object directly onto the photographic paper. The process of covering things in a skin of felt makes the objects become tactile and puts the emphasis is on their form. The felt covers the entire surface of the objects. It makes them appear both abstract and weightless.
‘…Barff is working through a whole series of boundary situations by her use of (those) objects. One of these is the substitution of touch for sight – as the artist puts it there is a kind of ‘blind indexicality’ to the wrapped objects; they are both the thing they are and prevented from communicating that indexical status.’
New Art from London, by Chris Townsend, Thames and Hudson 2006
Chapter 5 – Some Mark of In-between
