Ali Barker

Music is a major influence on Ali Barker’s work. She creates visual representations of music and sound in colour, inspired by her experiences of the phenomenon of sound-colour synaesthesia – when Ali listens to music she perceives notes of the musical scale as specific colours – expressing these through abstract paintings. Ali is also an orchestral musician in her spare time, playing violin and viola. The music that she performs inspires some of her paintings; other works are inspired by the wide range of music she listens to, or by music chosen by a client for a commission.

Many of Ali’s paintings are based on geometric forms, ranging from transcribed music to patterns derived from recorded sounds. Other paintings are expressive synaesthetic responses made by directly applying the colours to the paper or canvas whilst listening to a specific piece of music, or a combination of these styles.

A recent body of work, the culmination of her MA in Fine Art, focused on the relationship between the orchestra and the soloist in a concerto – highlighting the complexity of music but extracting key themes that form the musical structure. She aims to balance the integrity of her translational processes from her musical perspective with visual compositional decisions, exploring the many possibilities of colour and form to visually represent music through colour.

Ali is also interested in depicting the urban skyline as colourful cityscapes. In 2011 Ali won Merseytravel’s Art on the Network competition ‘Design a New Skyline’, for the Queensway (Birkenhead Tunnel). Her ‘Liverpool Composition’ and ‘Wirral Composition’ designs were made into murals on the new cladding, approximately 5m high and 22m wide, and are public artworks on permanent display at each end of the tunnel.