Ali Barker

Ali Barker 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.

Ali often works with patterns and geometric forms, creating works derived from translations of the written music or analysis of recorded sounds. Other paintings are expressive synaesthetic responses, made by directly applying the colours to the paper or canvas while listening to a specific piece of music, or a combination of these styles.

Ali is also inspired by architecture and skylines including complex cityscapes; however, she chooses to omit much of their detail and represent them as simplified forms. This is an area of her practice she has been expanding to include interior and exterior architecture of specific places. She then combines this with her experiences of being in those spaces, working with her same specific colour palette. During Ali’s residency at Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse Theatres (September 2023 – February 2024), she created a series of paintings responding to the contrasting architecture of the two theatres.

Ali completed her MA in Fine Art in 2019, with a body of work focusing on the relationship between the orchestra and the soloist in a concerto, highlighting the complexity of music but extracting key themes from the musical structure. Her ‘Liverpool Composition’ & ‘Wirral Composition’ mural designs are public artworks on display inside the Birkenhead Tunnel.