Barry won the 2016 Works on Paper prize.

Barry is a maker of images. Sometimes these are resolved as paintings, but at present he works mainly with printmaking, both relief and intaglio. Drawing on site is an intrinsic part of my practice. A love of mark-making sometimes takes the work towards abstraction.

Occasionally, and increasingly, the boundaries between painting, drawing and printmaking become blurred. Every image is an experiment in the long term process of trying to find out how to make images, most often concerned with his experience of place.

Barry has become involved in recent years in tracing the genealogy of his father’s family, many generations of which lived in Merionethshire. Though he was frequently in the area as a child, he have not visited for many years. He will be using the residency at Stiwdio Maelor to explore the visual traces of family and place in the area.   For several reasons, the starting point of his investigation would be St Illtyd’s church and churchyard in Llanelltyd. His aim, as far as he is able to rationalise it, is to make emotive and expressive links between his sense of being part of a Welsh diaspora and his experience, as a mature artist, of the place itself.