Anna Barden Memorial Exhibition
In collaboration with Backwater Artists Group
Main Gallery
5 February - 14 February 2026
Opening reception Thursday 05 February, 5.30-6.30pm
Anna Barden was an artist who worked and lived in Cork city. She passed away unexpectedly on 31 December 2024. This commemorative exhibition is a shared initiative involving family, friends and colleagues, with key involvement from Elaine Coakley, Studio Director, Backwater Artists Group; Katherine Boucher Beug, artist, friend and mentor; and Gillian Cussen, artist and friend.
Anna’s art practice encompassed drawing, painting sewing, short text pieces and ceramics. The display for this exhibition is built around a variety of finished works, studies and archival material spanning Anna’s career as an artist, kindly provided by her family. This includes early equine pieces related to a body of work that was shown in 2003 in Vangard Gallery Cork alongside sculptures by Michael Quane RHA; pencil and ink on paper chess piece drawings from 2015; topographical mixed media pieces from c.2015; a later oil on paper equine piece from 2019; oil on paper pieces from the yellow cup series c.2020, oil on canvas cat paintings from c.2021 and oil on paper/canvas self-portraits and studies from c.2021-2022. There is also a significant series on paper featuring text, drawing and embroidery.
“Anna’s work developed through deep personal and physical identity with certain themes or objects, her ability to draw and her writing. For many years she only depicted horses. She had known horses and riding as a child. Her horses, isolated on the canvas, were charged with knowing, fierceness, movement and brazen colours. In her images of eggs we see a completely different and more gentle colour palette and use of negative space. I see her closeness to her subject matter and her relentless, honest search making very particular demands on her. And in her images of her beloved cat, Moon, we see both great closeness and empathy but also new compositional exploring. As Anna explored her own story more deeply, she created an impressive series of self-portraits and used them to expand and deepen her knowledge and use of colour. They are most explicit and courageous in their contained expressiveness, and in their search for both meaning and formal rigour. And in her embroidery project, she converted her writings into a visual form by embroidering words with red thread onto silk. For example, “…you are the hero of your own story”. And finally, the beautiful still lives, her most recent works. Here she honours small domestic objects, gifts from others. These works exude a more settled confidence and her fine sensitivity.” Katherine Boucher Beug.
Anna was a member of Backwater Artists Network, since its inception in 2020. She exhibited in several Backwater Artists Group member exhibitions including; A Moment Before Lockdown, Studio 12, Backwater Artists Group (2020), Remaining Places, Fota House & Gardens (2021), Drawn Works, The Long Space, Backwater Artists Group (2024) and Deep Time, in Spike Island (2024). In 2022, she had a solo exhibition in our Studio 12 exhibition/project space, Falter. Check. Resolve which consisted of 18 drawings, 7 ceramic works and an accompanying text drawn on the wall, which served as both statement and memory. The work explored themes of mental illness and chess as seen through the world of Beckett’s ‘Murphy’. In 2024, she was awarded the Backwater Artists Network Residency and had a studio onsite for 6 months. She used the studio consistently and prolifically, to create a large body of work, some of which was due to be exhibited in The Long Space in February 2025. Anna had also exhibited ceramic pieces in the Summer Exhibition at Lavit Gallery in 2023 and had contributed paintings from her Yellow Cup series to the Winter Exhibition shortly before her passing in 2024.
Some of the artwork in the exhibition will be for sale, with one third of proceeds going to the Munster Lost and Found Pet Helpline.
Image: Anna Barden, The Yellow Cup Story – Interrupts With A Story, 2020, Oil on paper, 49 x 42cm
