James Barth: The Clumped Spirit is the third in a series of annual $80,000 commissions, funded by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund, and delivered in partnership with leading Australian galleries, to support mid-career and established artists to develop and present major new bodies of work. Previous instalments were TextaQueen: Bollywouldn’t at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Gadigal/Sydney, in 2022, and James Nguyen: Open Glossary at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 2023.

Barth studied at Queensland College of Art, graduating in 2014. She trained as a painter and her works play on traditional genres of portraiture and still life but exceed them. Using 3D-modelling software, she creates stages, props, and avatars, which are then transmuted into screen-printed oil paintings and animated videos. In her paintings, screen-printed images are brushed to soften them, scrambling the impersonal and the painterly.

Barth’s work explores themes of self representation and embodiment, contending with her experience as a trans-woman, navigating the constant pressures of visibility and vulnerability. Sometimes her works show idealised imagery; sometimes domestic scenes overwhelmed by decay. Mounds of organic material, such as cut-open fruit and leftover food are left to sweat and decompose. Her uncanny, airless world is imbued with a sense of ennui and listlessness.

In addition to new paintings and video, The Clumped Spirit makes a dramatic move into sculpture. Barth’s 3D-printed sculptures are coated in zinc, recalling petrified figures from Pompeii.