Sharna Barker is a visual artist exploring themes of metamorphosis and liminality underpinned by theories of (unconscious) desire. Working in painting and sculpture, she uses a precarious, tactile, and flesh-like materiality to interrogate how materials and forms can be representational tools that speak to an intertwinement of corporeality, embodied experiences, and conceptual meaning. Sharna borrows strategies from Surrealism and post-minimalism, such as repetition and fragmentation that trace irregularity and discontinuities. Her process leans into the cracks, leaks, and slippages from one moment to the next. The resulting works reveal an in-between state of ambiguity and underscore the transitory and material conditions of self/body.

Sharna is an artist and arts worker based in Brisbane/Meanjin, Australia. She has exhibited throughout South East Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria. She is a founding co-director of IN | artist run initiative at the Sunshine Coast/Kabi Kabi Country and was a finalist in the 2021 and 2023 Hazelhurst Art on Paper Award. Sharna holds a Doctor of Visual Art, Queensland Collage of Art, Griffith University for her thesis Vestiges of Self: Self-Portraiture in the Age of the Embodied, Decentred Subject that examined the boundaries and definitions of contemporary self-portraiture. Led by theorisations of desire, her practice-based research considered how self can be registered in fragmented presentations of the human form and how these devices point to self-construction as a bodily process that continually breaks down and transforms.

CV

TEXTS / PUBLICATIONS

Keep doing this until it comes together Exhibition Text by Caity Reynolds for The Perpetual Restart at IN artist run initiative

Tique Publication on Contemporary Art – Artistic Research Interview Series: Vestiges of Self: Self-Portraiture in the Age of the Embodied, Decentred Subject

From the outside in, and from the inside out by Taylor Hall, Exhibition Review: Porous

An Excerpt of Exchange, Exhibition text for nothing, everything, Sure Studio

In Conversation: nothing, everything (full transcript)

Interview, Sure Studio

https://mailchi.mp/4622a09c525e/sure-studio-newsletter-7-sharna-barker

Liminal States, The Old Lock Up

…flows through the line-break or ends at it by Emmalyn Hawthorne. Exhibition essay for Momentum.

Under Her Skin by Taylor Hall. Exhibition review for Something More

Painting in Space by Paul Bai. Exhibition essay for Something More.

Writing

Curatorial Essay, Disrupt, 2025 Western Downs Regional Artist Exhibition

Review of Conflated at Logan Art Gallery, 2023 https://lemonadeletters.com.au/reviews/conflated

Palpable States & Malleable Actions: a written response of Mucosa, Outer Space, Brisbane, 2021