Artist Profile

Alice Barker is a London-based queer non-binary painter whose practice explores memory, imagination, and identity as fluid and unstable states. A graduate of The University of Edinburgh (BA Hons Painting, 2021), Barker works with collage, thin oil washes, and turpentine to construct layered compositions where figures emerge and dissolve within expansive, psychologically charged landscapes. Their work often draws on family photographs, personal recollections, and moving image sources, transforming them into fragmented visual narratives that hover between nostalgia and unease. Balancing spontaneity with careful construction, their paintings evoke shifting states of clarity and distortion, where intimate moments feel both present and unreachable. Barker was selected for RSA New Contemporaries 2023, marking them as a rising voice in contemporary painting concerned with the complexities of perception, memory, and inner experience.