Orla Barry

Orla Barry is both visual artist and shepherd. She lives and works on the south coast rural Wexford where she runs a successful pedigree Lleyn sheep flock alongside her art practice. Barry writes, makes performances, video and sound installations. Her work focuses on language, both written and spoken, as well as its visual deconstruction and displacement. Fiction, auto-ethnography and oral history are blended to reflect on the culture of our disconnection from the countryside and the boundaries of art and the rural everyday. Barry plays with the fractured relationship between agriculture, gender and the natural world. But her work also deals with the materiality of words and approaches to writing and speaking to accentuate this physical and embodied understanding of language as visual form.