About

Sharna Barker is a visual artist who primarily works in painting and sculpture. Using materials such as paper and latex, she creates strange, corporeal structures that twist, float, expand, and melt through a continuous process of pulling her self/body apart and reshaping these parts. Here Sharna employs a precarious, skin-like materiality alongside strategies of self-effacement and repetition for the perpetual, and somatic (re)construction of ‘self’, highlighting themes of metamorphosis, liminality, and unconscious desire.

Her works display a material and formal unpredictability that emphasises movement over static forms and engagement. By accentuating absence and failure, and through the material qualities of her works—their folds, weight, textures, and tensions—these attenuated ‘bodies’ evoke familiar bodily sensations and drives that remain in an unstable, emerging state. Her mode of making rethinks what a body is and the limits of representation, maintaining bodily subjectivity and the body as a site for a continual re-evaluation of meaning. Sharna’s embodied exploration of subjectivity and self-representation (and their boundaries) questions who we are and why, as well as our relationships with ourselves, others, and the world.

Sharna is based in Brisbane/Meanjin, Australia. She has exhibited throughout South East Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria. She is a founding co-director (2021-2025) 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. Her works are held in private collections.