Shaney Barton uses multi-media to create visually impactful video and installation that bring the viewer closer to nature and highlight the sometimes strained relationship between mankind and the natural environment. Her work navigates research on current environmental issues such as the burgeoning moon mining race and geo-engineering weather manipulation technologies, bringing the viewer’s attention to unsettling alternatives to mainstream media narratives.

​

Her practice incorporates current research in the form of web and print-based social critique with evocative sound and visuals captured on a range of digital cameras, recording devices and handheld phones. Observations and documentation of everyday ‘natural’ phenomena wrestle with critical voices on growing environmental issues.

 

Pilgrimages into nature are reimagined for the gallery space through digital video, space and sound, these re-constructed models of nature are presented back to the audience for consideration, a means to ponder their own connection to the natural environment. In these multi-sensory, often heightened experiences, the audience is invited to question the extent to which their own perception of the natural world is mediated and shaped by stories and indirect experience.  

 

Barton graduated with a Master’s degree from Newcastle University in 2018, where she was the recipient of the Pybus scholarship fund. She has shown work in the UK and abroad, with a successful solo exhibition at Allenheads Contemporary Arts in 2019, a venue with dark skies status and its own astronomical observatory. Her video work has been featured in a stage production of Handel’s ‘Acis and Galatea’ at the historical Tyne Theatre and more recently in the Whitley Bay Film Festival’s 10th Anniversary as part of the C-Side short-film screenings programme.

​

​

​