Aideen Barry: for she is always creeping

Taking over both gallery spaces at The Whitaker, for she is always creeping is an adaptation of Aideen Barry’s By Slight Ligaments and has been specially re-imagined for The Whitaker.

for she is always creeping includes film, sound, drawing and digital animation. Sound and imagery will overwhelm visitors, playing with the senses, marking out connection, dislocation, and our bodies in a changing world.  

The title of the exhibition comes from Charlotte Perkins Gilman's gothic feminist novella, Thee Yellow Wallpaper, which explores misogynistic and claustrophobic attitudes towards the mental and physical health of women.  

Aideen Barry is an Irish visual artist whose work has been widely exhibited in solo and group exhibitions and commissions internationally. She works primarily with video, animation, installation and performance, and her work grapples with issues of domestic labour – and we are delighted to welcome her and for she is always creeping to The Whitaker. 

Included in the exhibition is Monachopsis, a suite of fifty-nine drawings made as a visual diary during the height of the lockdown period of 2021.

Alongside Monachopsis, Barry’s mixed media work Listen Liquid: The Syllables will be installed in Gallery 2 on the first floor of The Whitaker. The work is an animated drawing and digital wallpaper, a bricolage of botanical studies reassembled as a digital collage.

Barry will also be showing a range of films, video installations and interventions in The Whitaker, including Self Portrait, a nine-screen film installation in Gallery 2 and Klostés, which was created by the people of Kaunas, Lithuania with Barry.

Cover Image: Past work by Aideen Barry - "Listen Liquid" Aideen Barry, LCGA, Photo Credit Darren Ryan