Valerie Barker – Committee Member
Valerie Barker is an artist, cartographer and designer.
Becoming an artist was a childhood dream. Valerie was always drawing.
Training at Goldsmiths, not as an artist as she would have loved, but as a geographer and geologist, led to a teaching career. Cartography, botanical illustration, quilting and embroidery have paralleled teaching and lecturing and been stepping stones to textile art. Her dream is coming true.
Currently Valerie is exploring the use of silk and thread to construct landscapes and seascapes observed on and around her croft, in Caithness and in the wider environment.
Her pictures are composed of dye painted silk strips, by-products of the sari making process:
“I paint the land, seas and skies I see on my croft and in the wider Caithness and northern Highland landscape, inspired by prose and poetry celebrating each location.
Searching the literature to discover words that sum up its significance in history to the people who knew it then, or to find why it is considered worthy of note today is as important to me as creating the image and so each picture is accompanied by words special to that place.”