Zoe Barry
Residency: August 6 – 27, 2019
Photo by Sina Dehghani
While at the residency, Barry started a new piece entitled “The Nervous Atmosphere” based on her experience 10 years ago when she had 3 close encounters with lightning within a 6-month time period. These incidents had a profound effect on her physically, mentally, and spiritually. They put her on higher vibrational planes, feeling like she had left the human realm and had merged with nature. Barry’s work and small performance of “The Nervous Atmosphere” in the residency studio explored her feelings of expansiveness, infinity, terror, and peace.
Photo by Sina Dehghani
Zoe Barry is a cellist, performer, and educator. Her approach to her work is collaborative, reflective, and contemplative. She has two streams to her compositional work--narrative composition for film or theaters; and nonrepresentational pieces for private practice and commissions from galleries and ensembles. Her compositions and sound collages explore the internal world, the ether, the void, and the infinite. Barry uses modern compositional, extended string, and expansions on Turkish cello techniques. Her music is rooted in the philosophical underpinnings of baroque repertoire and her love of experimental and durational music.
Barry creates music with dissolved edges that hovers and unfolds into space. Her sound collage draws together text, field recordings, sound design, and composition. She collaborates with a wide range of musicians and artists, working across immersive theater, film, gallery installations, and chamber music. The Lucid Art Foundation was her first residency experience. Barry lives and works in Kyneton, Australia.