I work across a variety of sculpture formats including collage, drawing, sound, installation, performance duration. More recently I’ve been developing new work in writing and the voice around illness, disability, and care. My work often contemplates the built environment of the places where I exhibit through the relationship with my body, the viewing and felt experience. Within this my work considers material, environmental and sensory relations, and the politics of the body and labour, often through invisible processes such as energy transmission, the passage of time, cumulative and reductive forces. Liminality is central positions from which I seek a language and ways to express ideas of presence and absence, the material and immaterial. This state of in-between-ness is informed by my growing up and living with a chronic auto-immune condition where I need extended periods of time being away from, out of time, and suspended to rest my body, care, and recover.
I am a member of Para-lab Manchester; a group of artists and material scientists interested in cooperation and collaboration based across Greater Manchester and Yorkshire. As part of my work within Para-lab, I’m in a Material Research group developing bio-concretes. My recent exhibitions include Articulations (2022), The National Festival of Making – a solo presentation of work developed through an Art in Manufacturing Residency at Darwen Terrracotta & Faience in Blackburn; Hospitalfield Interdisiplinary Residency (2021); The Position of the Sun in the Sky, White Columns online (2021), Personal Structures, PAPER Pavilion, Palazzo Mora, Venice Biennale (2019); Each Toward the Other, Bury Sculpture Centre (2019); Major Conversations, Platform A Gallery (2019) touring to the Turnpike Gallery (2019); Ruth Barker & Hannah Leighton-Boyce, Castlefield Gallery (2018) touring to Glasgow Women’s Library (2019).
Links
Para-lab Manchester
Each Toward the Other Derek Horton
Consequences of progress, remnants for the future Sara Jaspan
Inbetweenness or the ever-failing attempt to let the orange orange: Hannah Leighton-Boyce’s Repose, Craig Staff.
Ruth Barker & Hannah Leighton-Boyce, Selina Oakes
Consequences of progress, remnants for the future, Jazmine Linklater
Turning around and back again, Lauren Velvick.
Ruth Barker and Hannah Leighton-Boyce, by Miles Knapp
Instruments of Industry, by Jack Welsh
A Chorus of Objects, Dr. Laura Mansfield
Some thoughts on multiple lifeworlds: identity, culture & politics, Dr Iain Biggs