ARTIST STATEMENT
Ut Barley’s collages are an ode to feminine power and to our connection with nature, which she sees as a fairy tale-like diary.
Over the years, she has experimented with a blend of various different techniques for her analog collage: writing, embroidery, painting (watercolour, oil pastel, gouache)...& also plants and flowers which she finds in nature.
Influenced by mythologies, Ut Barley’s collages are like illustrated fairy tales: changing bodies which transmute with their environments to reveal changing emotions, sometimes contradictory ones and which are concealed within each and every one of us. Her characters and imaginary worlds translate into the visual expression of a feeling, a state, a vision or a sensation... Through her enchanted immersions, she conjures the turmoil which are the direct consequences of a growing oppression, the consequences of our emotions on our civilization, the environment and the spirituality of our ancestors.
She creates hybrid characters, mysterious creatures that exist within a fantasy world filled with symbolism.
She tackles subjects that can seem provocative and terrifying such as physical and mental violence, the way we look at ourselves and at others as well as exploring our emotions or even our spirituality through the invisible world. She also does this by dealing with the themes of beauty, monstrosity, mysticism, bodily transformation or even strangeness.
Her work is a tribute to the power of the living and to our connection with nature. She has also since turned towards filmmaking in order to breathe new life into her collages which she sees as still frames from fantastical films, as if we had hit the pause button on an image from a dreamlike world.
ARTIST BIO
Anaïs aka Ut Barley is a collage artist based in Paris (France).
After studying cinema and art history, she focused her work on collage, which she practices both in analog and digital form. During her exhibitions, she frequently works on hybrid projects with dancers and singers, who echo the collages which she exhibits. This is something that she had the opportunity to experiment at the French Institute of Innsbruck in Austria and in Belgium at the TAG Gallery.
Since 2014, she has been a member of the artistic collective Hic Est Sanguis Meus created by the Italian artist Paola Daniele. She produced a series of collages on prejudices and myths which evolve around women’s conditions as well as two films «Dolor», broadcast on TV5 Monde and «Sensitive», which won the Jury Prize for best experimental short film at the Women’s Short Film Festival in Pozzuoli.
An extract of her analog collage work was published in 2017 in the book «Making the cut, the world’s best collage artists, vol.1» in Australia. In 2020, The Collector Magazine invited him to make collages on the theme «Lights» and was part of the group exhibition «Eternal» at the Boomer Gallery in London.
In 2021, she created the exhibition «Les Invisibles» in collaboration with a photographer, for which she created a collage made fresco. She supervised and led the project, from the exhibition at the Espace Beaurepaire in Paris in March 2021 up to the complete creation of the book in 2 volumes published and released in March 2022.
In 2022, she works with an herborist Elisa Ritter on a series of analog collages «Joy of Nature» created with real dried flowers.
Following this collaboration, she developed two new series «The Secrets of Spirits» & « Guardians » analog collages made from organic materials like petals on recycled paper and handmade paper made with plants.