Disko Bay Expedition

Profile: Kathy Barber

Artist and Designer
Kathy is an Australian artist and designer with a diverse creative practice that centers on an interest in working in public space. Her work spans a background in graffiti art and a range of projects including large-scale video projection onto grain silos in the Australian wheat belt, community projects in South London, hijacked billboards and self-powered, portable neon pieces. The website she created for Cape Farewell won a UN e-Science award in 2005. She will be out in the cold with a portable satellite gear updating the blogs during the Disko Bay expedition.

Kathy joined the Cape Farewell Art/Science Expeditions to the Arctic in both 2004 and 2007, broadcasting daily updates to the website via satellite. On her return she co-curated Earth, Wind and Fire as part of Whitechapel’s Late Night series.

Her work Here Today, created for Cape Farewell’s Ice Garden exhibition and shown at the Natural History Museum in 2006, is currently touring as part of Art & Climate Change.

Since 1990, as Wish One, she has carved her own way through a mostly male dominated graffiti scene, painting, exhibiting and collaborating internationally alongside world renown graffiti artists in spaces across Australia, Asia and Europe. She has collaborated with Kangol on her own range of hats, exhibited widely with graffiti collective TheyMadeMeDoIt, led large-scale graffiti productions and painted for music festivals including The Big Chill and Australia’s largest touring music festival the Big Day Out. Her work in graffiti, combined with growing up in one of the most isolated cities in the world, led to an interest in the emerging potential of the internet as a new form of public space. She became involved with collaborative projects experimenting with early internet broadcasts and interactive works, including events with performance artist, Stelarc.

In 2004 she became a director of independent creative company Bullet Creative, designing websites for a wide range of artists and organisations including Siobhan Davies Dance, Jeremy Deller’s Bat House Project, Arts Council England and Cape Farewell, which was one of five winners in the e-Science category of the UN World Summit Awards, 2005.

Read Kathy’s blog posts ›
More about her work with Cape Farewell ›

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