The Exquisite Fiberwork of Dana Barnes
For a long while it seemed that the vocabulary developed by artists such as Sheila Hicks and Claire Zeisler would never be reclaimed. Then came Dana Barnes.
– Glenn Adamson, Objects: USA 2020
Based in Manhattan, New York, Dana Barnes creates fiber-based floor and wall works, sculptures, and site-specific architectural installations masterfully woven by hand. Her work reveals a deep understanding of materiality, process, and form, aspiring to simultaneously evoke visceral and physical responses from viewers.
Barnes' unique textile-work combines fiber with contrasting elements, such as concrete, stone, wood, copper, clay, resin, rubber, and recently steel and glass. She utilizes innovative wet bonding processes to fuse these materials and form three-dimensional abstract compositions that defy convention and challenge viewers' preconceived notions of fiber works.
Barnes’s recent work, Shades & Shards, featured in Objects: USA 2020, is an amalgam of organic and industrial materials that explores the intrinsic tension between lightness and darkness, emphasizing how light and color provide a natural fulcrum to measure emotion.
Dark gradations of wool and fibers are hand-knotted, contorted, and boiled into dense sculptural and fragmented configurations. These masses envelop linear steel beams and igneous stones, creating sub-assemblages, or fragments, that appear ominous and intimidating. These raw materials coexist with infused shards of dichroic glass and shimmering stones that create flickers of light and color that break through the grim hues and elicit feelings of hope in the viewer.
Against the backdrop of today’s universal adversity and recovery, Shades & Shards highlights the idea that art can be a source of renewal. Emotional energy animates and coalesces the five fragments that make up the assemblage, evoking an immediate response that ultimately yields resiliency, restoration and connectedness.
Dana Barnes studied at Parsons and The New York Studio School. Her work can be found in acclaimed modern architectural spaces as well as private collections throughout the United States, Western Europe, Scandinavia, Dubai, Russia, China and India. She founded Dana Barnes Studio in 2010 and works with a small team of artisans to hand make both small and large-scale compositions.