Common Ground: Aideen Barry Artist Talk

Artist Aideen Barry will discuss her expansive multidisciplinary practice in connection with Silent Songs, her first solo exhibition in Canada. Bringing together works across film, animation, sculpture, and performance, the exhibition includes Barry's new film, Embroidering the Earth's Mantle (2025), which will receive its world premiere.

Based in Ireland, Barry creates work that uses visual illusion to give familiar subjects an unsettling quality. Her recent projects draw on folklore and historical research to explore how cultural memory survives, especially where traditions have been suppressed. Through experimental approaches to filmmaking, she creates imaginative worlds in which these histories find new forms of expression.

Collaboration plays an important role in Barry's practice, often extending beyond the visual arts to work with artists, musicians, designers, and composers such as Peter Gabriel, William Kentridge, ᕇᑦRIIT, and Irene Buckley. Her projects develop in relationship to collaborators from different fields and backgrounds to unite creative processes and shape unique artworks.

Over her career, Barry has exhibited widely at venues including The Bangkok Art Biennial; FORMAT international festival of photography (UK); Salzburg Kunstverein (Austria); The Irish Museum of Modern Art (Ireland); CAC Malaga (Spain); The Headlands Center for the Arts (US); and Skaftfell (Iceland).

Silent Songs is curated by Séamus Kealy with the support of Jenifer Papararo and Natalie Stone. This artist talk is programmed by Isabella Springett and Jasmine Yeung as part of Common Ground, a new programming partnership co-presented by Oakville Galleries and Sheridan College.