James Barth: The Clumped Spirit

James Barth is an artist to watch. Her compelling use of mediums touch on science fiction, cinematic storytelling and poetic gestures, centered on representations of her trans experience. Using 3D modeling software, painting and video, her sophisticated and complex self-portraits sit within modernist modes of aesthetic idealism, tempered with symbols of decay and collapse.

The Clumped Spirit at UNSW Galleries is a joint project with the IMA in Brisbane, and the third in a series of annual commissions, funded by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund to support mid-career and established artists. I remember coming across one of Barth’s works in the exhibition Embodied Knowledge: Queensland Contemporary Art at the Queensland Art Gallery in 2022. In the work a face peered out from a sub-tropical landscape, at once retreating and emerging from it—half in shadow, but never losing sight of my gaze. The face was a construction of course —“Digi James” a digital avatar of Barth’s that in The Clumped Spirit is making a final act after some eight years as a placeholder for the artist.

Barth explains in her artist’s talk that the intention of The Clumped Spirit was to give her avatar a swan song for her stand-in, an understudy that the artist created to take her place from early investigations into self-portraiture using the photographic image. Working with an avatar invited new configurations for the self and performative possibilities of the body. In her artist talk Barth revealed that this intended retreat, however, has shifted to a sort of maternal empathy for her avatar who may have become simply another accessible body vulnerable to spectacle.

This final act finds new meaning at UNSW Galleries however, with its ruinous collapse and symbols of decay framed by a current political climate of putrid politics that seek to dismantle crucial protections for transgender people.

The exhibition includes painted screenprints, moving image, and for the first time for the artist, sculptural forms, creating a space that, although centers around a single protagonist, is occupied by a multi-presence that reaches through four gallery spaces, all unified in tones of puter, silver, greys and white. Two spaces, darkened to house the animated videos Stone Milker, 2024, and The Clumped Spirit, 2024, sit as book ends to a tale of self realisation that is complicated by scenes of abandonment and wreckage on one hand and hope and rebirth on another. Sculptural figures positioned throughout the space populate this mythological world like Caryatids from an ancient time.

In the film Stone Milker, 2024, the artist has used the 3D animation software Blender to animate her aviator through a filmic lens. The movement comes from a 1960’s aesthetic ̶ a self-expressive contemporary dance that is grounded in minimalism. The dance piece is presented as an emotional finale in opposition to the various states of lethargy or rest seen in the paintings and sculptures. On adjacent walls to the film oil painted screen prints show dilapidated spaces in half ruin, but in contrast the avatar’s body reclines in a relaxed state, recalling scenes from JG Ballard’s Crash, where bodies find pleasure where most would recoil. Stone Milker (Study 3), 2024.

The video work The Clumped Spirit, 2024, introduces a staged behind-the-scenes look at the avatar in rehearsal. This moment is striking as we witness the avatar perform “off script,” enacting something else entirely. Video game genres play out here adding to the idea of surveillance and deepening the dystopic worlding the artist seeks to create.

The sculptural forms are born from the digital world, but alive in the space they appear to have taken on non-human and decaying growth forms — half eaten fruit, whole vegetables like new limbs seeking to thrive in this new world but suspended by their own materiality. The surface of these figures are fixed by a coating of zinc recalling Pompeien bodies encased in time-hardened ash. This contraposition of self-obliteration and self-representation plays out in Barth’s practice that draws from compost and decay as a metaphor for the loss of indexicality.

The repetition of limbs are from a clipping technique used by Barth, that makes the body appear to be stepping out and back towards itself simultaneously, insisting on a presence but obfuscating any attempt at an intimate encounter. This tactical evasiveness plays out in various ways throughout the exhibition ̶ such as a brushing over technique blurring forms in the paintings, and the repeated shadows and light in the films that extend to the gallery space itself.

The eyes that once gazed at me back in 2022, are nowhere to be found in these sculptural forms. The face is either scooped away entirely, or is so bulging with decayed plant matter to be unrecognisable as human at all. I am struck by a feeling that this may not be the last we see of Barth’s shape-shifting avatar. Her spectacular existence seems to me as if it’s in a state of becoming, rather than retreating. We may not recognise her future self, but I’ve no doubt she will find an existence that exceeds and pushes the self portrait genre beyond the body towards a state of becoming.

Exhibition
James Barth: The Clumped Spirit
14 Feb – 4 May 2025
UNSW Galleries, Sydney

Images courtesy of the artist and UNSW Galleries, Sydney.