Trap 1989. 770x580mm. Graphite on Arche hot pressed cotton rag — **Trap** 1989. 770x580mm. Graphite on Arche hot pressed cotton rag

Shadwell Quadrent II 1991 180x160 Acrylic on layered boards of marouflaged canvas painted hardwood rods..Private collection 1991 — **Shadwell Quadrent II** 1991
180x160 Acrylic on layered boards of marouflaged canvas and painted hardwood rods..
Private collection 1991

Dark distorted grids and lines overdrawn in red — '**Rushby Fury IV**' from the 'Alecto' sequence from the intervention '**Aqua six margins of Lethe - Matters of time**'. Size A4. Manipulated Digital print on 310gm Arche 88 cotton rag paper worked over with Soft Pastel. November 2025.

About

Malcolm Barrett

My working practice concerns intervention into specific spaces often focussing on the edge between particular states of ‘being’ and time and are derived from specific shaped walks.. My work uses a range of media often with film to help an understanding of what the eye and body encounters but its counterpoint through the silence of ‘static’ media of painting, print, found materials and book-works all have a role in what I produce for a particular space.. Sometimes visual references focus a direction from works by others (eg Bosch’s ‘Garden of Worldly Delights’ in the film-work e.g Fugium 1 and Aqua).

Being trained as a painter there is a strong association with drawing, and early interventions of works for specific spaces are reflected in the development of work that challenged the traditional form of painting where canvasses were always rectangular and flat. This challenge for me then lead to using layered and discontinuous or multiple serial shapes, (especially where they drew on an early interest in medieval painting (eg triptychs)).

By 1989 works had already embraced different mediums derived from the space the work was to be introduced into (eg painted layers of ply wood, the introduction of gold leaf which was then obliterated (eg ‘Station (Fall 1’)), or the use of found plastic forms along with the use of melted tin). Soon after that date, digital imagery was also being explored for its very transient nature and a sense of change (eg ‘Pilgrim’ uses a S/N 14 mile line from the City of London to Waltham Abbey and back along the River Lea. The digital images were selected from a randomly selected initial form and is then searched for at every mile Northwards.

Since 2004 a number of film-works have been ‘presented ‘ within forms derived from domestic sources (boxes, cabinets, drawers, frames, table tops, suitcases). They challenge the notion of film as a passive remote entertainment, even to having found objects presented alongside the filmwork (eg earth) that have been discovered on specific walks.

‘Isabella’s Progress’ is a 14 mile W/E walked line that follows a C19th Spanish Royal Progress. Films and works relate to that original journey through the closed ‘drawers’ of a 3D structure

Importantly film allows for a multiplicity of viewpoints to inform the space and its changes, and the work, although it can be seen remotely is nevertheless optimised for local engagement (eg Three Gardens was viewed inside a church at a time when a specific subject would be uppermost in the viewers mind).

This trailer for “Aqua - Six margins of Lethe’ represents a 20 min ‘short’ using a Fibonacci Sequence for its structure and concerned with a ‘shaped’ walk along the river Pix. The Pix is a natural source for Chalk filtered water making it a rare earth bound commodity.. It however also serves a ‘utopian’ community that would not have developed without this quality of water. Yet the walk discovered its source as a dried up spring full of fly tipped waste and the initial course of the river either totally or partially filled in. Any residual water was probably highway run-off, and thus contaminated This experience then led to a reading of the Pix as one of the waters of Lethe, (the river in Hades that is dedicated to forgetting) which in turn offered the light of Hemera dropping into darkness and sleep (Hypnos) before entering death (Thanatos). The lower visible and open sections of water became Alecto due to the urban noise and water management constrictions finally ending with Portal where the river leaves the community yet a place where fences now turn their back on the nature reserve. This is also the place where one hears the dog guarding - what? but echoes Cerebus and old hollow oak trees that have teeth and eyes like one finds in Breugal’s drawings (eg the vice of excess). While at the same time figures wrapped in their own time pass through without seeing, as one finds in Bosch’s ‘Garden of Worldly delights” .

This film-work along with Field 15 was shown at the Broadway Gallery Letchworth Garden City as part of the intervention Aqua - City of Dreams - Matters of Time.( https://www.broadway-gallery.com ) from24th April to 30 May 2026.