In James Barth's works, we witness a conflict. Awash in cold metal and the sweat of decaying plant matter, The Clumped Spirit begs the question: Where is the line distinguishing representation and personality? On exhibit at the Institute of Modern Art until December 22, Barth dissolves the roles of identity and representation.

After training as a self-portraitist at the Queensland College of Art, Barth quickly shed the traditional paradigms of the painting discipline. She began using a 3D modelling software to aid in the construction of digital tableaux featuring mundane objects and avatars in her likeness, whom she dubbed 'Digi James'. These digital images were then translated to silkscreens, printed in monochrome and softened with brushstrokes, combining virtual techniques with painterly ones. 

Barth’s technical virtuoso seeps through her 2021 works Gleaming, I’m Shown and Spilled Blueberries—gauzy images that see her avatar (Digi James) languishing in waste. The former work pictures Digi James lying across garments arranged in mimesis of a companion or lover. In Spilled Blueberries, renderings of rot and decay are more provocative in the sweltering humidity of the desolate landscape. Here, Digi James lies atop scattered berries and leaves, her lower body speckled with dappled lighting. On one hand, the image is a masochistic celebration of the artist’s own degradation; on the other, a vessel of regeneration and nourishment. Barth embodies the Dionysian and Apollonian. 

These works reveal the dichotomies at the centre of Barth's work—the times when the psychic collides with the domestic, or self-destruction is palliated by restoration. Under the weight of these contending forces, she asks whether the centre can really hold.

In The Clumped Spirit, Barth’s sculptures crescendo into destruction. The works can be considered as rumblings of shame and humiliation that itch closer to the surface, breaking skin. Coated in zinc and aluminium, they serve as daunting parallels to the petrified figures of Pompeii, paralysed in perpetual decay. Their poses range from an Olympian lounge to a timid crouch. Fungal growth and rotting fruit harken back to Barth’s signature stigmata, offering a reminder of the relationship between selfhood, vitality and loss. 

The eulogy for Digi James arrives in mutant form as her sculptures grow extraneous limbs and disfigured heads, invoking familiar themes of morbidity and fatality. Their grotesque physicality mirrors a deeper condition—an almost Cartesian reflection on the artist’s vulnerability.