With her work Vivid Dreaming, Sally Barker strips, addresses and re-dresses aspects of masculinity and creates a new, male, bird-creature. In contrast to Frink’s Harbinger; long legged, with a brooding, bulky body, Barker’s is lighter on his feet, still striding on long legs but here with delicate blue ceramic feet. Its sharpened talons once for snatching prey are rendered impractical with feminine manicured nails. Sections of the sculpture are made from a pin-striped Saville Row suit, forensically cut and frayed before coating in mascara and eye shadow. In its deconstruction, Barker breaks down the patriarchal structure of this icon of capitalism and male power. Barker borrows a sense of absurdity borrowed from the surrealist agenda, incorporating the uncanny and bizarre, with elements of the real and the dream world.
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