Hayley Barker @ Ingelby Gallery, Edinburgh

Hayley Barker’s big, bold and beautiful paintings combine apparently prosaic personal details of the artist’s immediate surroundings in her home and studio in LA with an awareness of time passing and the contradiction of painting as a means of both measuring time’s passage and freezing the moment.  In this exhibition, Barker celebrates the cycle of the seasons in response to the play of light across the four walls of the main gallery in the old Glasite Meeting House, designed in the 1830s as a religious space, and carefully positioned to channel the shifting light, as if the building were a giant sundial.

The exhibition, The Ringing Stone, is anchored by four majestic paintings of the artist’s garden across the course of the year, alongside seasonally specific depictions of other scenes and still lives that play to Barker’s balance of recording intimately personal, often ritualistic, subjects that have an invitingly universal frame of reference.