Meet the artist: Orla Barry

Orla Barry is both visual artist and shepherd. She lived in Brussels for sixteen years and now lives and works in Wexford, Ireland, where she runs a successful pedigree Lleyn flock alongside her art practice. Her work focuses on language, both written and spoken, as well as its visual deconstruction and displacement— via frequently associative techniques. Barry plays with the fractured relationship between agriculture, gender and the natural world. But her work also deals with the materiality of words and approaches to writing and speaking to accentuate this physical and embodied understanding of language as visual form. Orla Barry has recently performed at WoWmen Festival KAAI (2020) Playground, Museum M & TAZ, Ostend (2019) Performatik 17, Brussels. Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, TBG&S, Dublin. She has also performed at The Project Arts Centre, Dublin, The South London Gallery & Tate Modern, London, and De Appel in Amsterdam.

Kathleen Weyts is the editor-in-chief of GLEAN. From 2019 to 2023 she was the director of HART magazine, the Belgian magazine for contemporary art (and predecessor of GLEAN). She is a writer, lecturer and consultant in art management. She was the director of CAHF, Contemporary Art Heritage Flanders, and co-curated ‘Somewhere in Between. Contemporary Art Scenes in Europe’, ‘Imagine Europe, In Search of New Narratives’ and the symposium Variations on Vulnerability, all at Bozar, Brussels.