Statement / Bio

Aideen Barry has a great capacity to build images, full of ingenuity, fantasy and energy. Theorizing and arguing about anxiety and the multiple forms and circumstances in which it manifests constitutes the discursive axis of her work, for which she carries out continuous research in the performative and material fields, resorting to contortions and ridiculous situations that collect her videos and develop later on other media such as sculpture, drawing or dioramas. The tone combines the hilarious with the pathetic, linked the narrative to the strictly personal and domestic everyday in a feminine key. The artist plays with the concept of cognitive dissonance trying to make her work perceived in a paradoxical way, attracting and simultaneously repelling the viewer. She tries to capture it by using a pattern in which a thing can be familiar but strange and threatening at the same time. Her poetics show an interest in Irish Gothic and “das unheimlich” (the uncanny), the mysterious and the peculiar, with frequent direct or indirect references. All of this as tools to express human behavior in the unique space between diversion and discomfort, creating balance and tension in the intermediate zone.