Installation view of Marina, by Amelia Barratt. Courtesy of the artist and CORPUS, Cambridge. Photography: Stephen James
Amelia Barratt’s ‘Marina’ is the fourth exhibition to take place in CORPUS gallery in Cambridge, a white cube space for contemporary art on King’s Street which opened last year. Barratt (b.1989) is a Glasgow-based artist who works across painting, writing, performance and music. She was taught at the Glasgow School of Art by Richard Walker (b.1955), whose paintings featured in ‘All These Moves’, the second exhibition held at CORPUS from 1 November – 20 December 2025.
‘Marina’ consists of eleven new paintings made over the last year. Barratt’s paintings emerge from photos of Glasgow’s industrial cityscape taken on her phone during her daily walks to the studio. Though the titles of her paintings (‘Gas Leak’, ‘Out of Doors’, ‘Poolside’, ‘Vegetation’) suggest their origin in photographs of real things, she crops these photos to the point where the subject matter is no longer instantly recognisable. This means her compositions lie somewhere between close-up figuration and defamiliarizing abstraction. We know we are seeing a detail or part of something but we can’t quite place it, make sense of it, or put it in context, and the effect is disorientating—encouraging the viewer to slow down to parse these arrangements of industrial detritus.
Because Barratt works on the studio floor, there is a multi-directionality to her brushwork, and perhaps a sense that these collections of things are being viewed from above. To put this another way, Barratt rejects traditional perspectival order. Instead, her paintings juxtapose busier areas of constellated or collaged detail with calmer areas of flat colour. She often uses a fat brush and opaque paint to contrast with areas of noise and detail scratched and drawn onto the surface with a much smaller brush. Other marks are wispy, rough and transparent, or stained wet-on-wet into the soaked canvas ground. This means that areas of these paintings appear in and out of focus, linking back to the origins of the image in photography, whilst at the same time pushing beyond photography to consider the imaginative possibilities and materiality of painting.
‘Poolside’, for instance, conjures the image of a corner of a pool. The variegated, lacquered brushwork on the opposite corner of the composition recalls a collage of detail that is precise and descriptive but that ultimately resists being parsed as something recognizable. In terms of colour, Barratt often juxtaposes high chroma with dirty greys and neutral tones. Behind the mint greens of ‘Vegetation’ are shocks of fluorescent orange. In ‘Orbital Waste’ yellow complements purplish greys. In ‘Out of Doors’ a broad sweep of matte orange is decorated with blood-red squiggles. In ‘Shipping’, careful attention is paid to each meeting-point of pink and purple.
Left: Gas Leak (2026) [detail], by Amelia Barratt. Right: Winter’s Edge (2026) [detail], by Amelia Barratt. Courtesy of the artist and CORPUS, Cambridge. Photography: Stephen James
The biggest work in the exhibition, ‘Hybrid’, reminiscent of Guston’s ‘crapola’ pictures in the stacked structure of its composition, lacks the in-and-out-of-focus feel of the mark-making in Barratt’s other paintings. At their best, areas of her compositions that suggest the experience of seeing through space are held in tension with others that revel in intricacy and flatness. Take, for instance, ‘Winter’s Edge’, where the curve of blue-green, orange and dark grey creates a Hodgkin-like effect of a frame within a frame, isolating the red-kettle shape at the painting’s centre with that bright green slice beneath it. These complementary colours bring forward what we might assume would be behind the dark patterning in the bottom left corner.
All of this is to say that Barratt is an artist who looks closely at her everyday surroundings and considers their sensory mediation, who revels in the intricacy and strangeness of industrial detritus, and who challenges human scales of perception and knowledge. In the clean white space of CORPUS gallery, these paintings, hanging between a silver ceiling of exposed pipework and a silver floor, conjure a wonderfully complex and colour-filled world of industrial detail.
By George Adams
‘Marina’ is on show at CORPUS from 21 March – 2 May 2026
Installation view of Marina, by Amelia Barratt. Courtesy of the artist and CORPUS, Cambridge. Photography: Stephen James
The Camera 