Anna Barriball, Light drawing, 2000. Marker pen on lamp and paper, Dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London.

One of the first works encountered in Anna Barriball’s first UK survey show at Milton Keynes Gallery is Draw (fireplace), an installation with video and sound.  Shot in monochrome, from a fixed position, it shows a piece of tracing paper hung over a fireplace being sucked in and out by a draft in the flue of the chimney behind. The pace of the breath is quicker than you’d expect, and it’s not soft, or gentle like the movement of normal, restorative, life giving breath – it’s more insistent than that, more brittle, harder.  And it’s spookily, unexpectedly loud.

A gigantic breath in and the paper is sucked tight against the wrought ironwork of the fire surround… and then it breathes out… and almost on top of itself it is being sucked in and for the briefest moment the texture of the fire surround, the pattern of the tiles is there in relief through the opaque whiteness of the milky paper…and then it breathes out… and almost at once the paper is sucked back in with a whoosh, buckled tightly back in on itself… and out again… and in again, whoosh, sharply with a thud… and out again… and in again whoosh, those tiles… and out… and in, whoosh…

It’s a mesmerising effect – a piece of paper pushed to the limits of its capabilities by a kind of super-size mechanical simulation of breath, made slightly sinister against a vision of the home as living, breathing organism.

Other works in the exhibition are similarly unsettling as subtle interventions into the ordinariness of every day objects.  In Light Drawing, a desk lamp drenched in bright yellow ink is placed on the floor, apparently shining a perfect patch of equally yellow light onto the wall beside it.  Closer examination reveals the glow as an illusion, not a patch of light but a perfect circle drawn onto a sheet of paper coloured in by the same hand, and with the same yellow marker pen that coloured the lamp. In Silver Map and Money Drawing the surface of each document (a map of the world and a £5 note) have also been covered, the original printed subject matter almost completely obliterated, saturated so thoroughly, this time with silver and gold pen, that the quality of the paper itself seems fundamentally altered. 

Brick Wall is a graphite pencil rubbing of an ordinary brick wall.  The paper has been worked upon so meticulously that it begins to feel photographic; a perfect three dimensional index of its subject, a photograph in relief that bears the smallest traces of detail from the original wall.  Through the signs of stress, pencil punctures and tears in the surface of the paper, it is also an account of the process itself – a perfect conjunction between the materials (paper, pencil, wall) and what’s been done to them, by them and with them.

As with her work in other media, with photography Barriball works with the objects and architecture that surround her, appropriating what already exists, breathing life into something that was already there.  Windows 1-10 is a series of found photographs covered by a sheet of white card, with a small aperture cut into each one, exposing a window in the otherwise concealed image.  Abstracting the windows so completely draws attention to the strange perspective that defines each one, yet at the same time, that same perspective, devoid of its context looses any sense of depth, or connection with the real word.

Alongside the breathing of life into, there is also a sense of taking away – of fragmentation, abstraction.  Up close the surface of many of the drawings fractures; these surfaces are not clean and smooth, they have been worked on, hard.  The marks have been made in rows, as if in bursts, a rhythm in the effort, like words in a sentence with the spaces taken out, gesture and language all rolled in to one.