Deserted Barcode

Adil Writer attributes his fascination with stars and dark skies to being born under the sign of Aries. He laments the growing loss of these “celestial companions of the night” in increasingly artificial, light-polluted urban skies. In a recurring dream, he sees himself painting a night sky amidst vast sand dunes: an image that became the basis for A Deserted Barcode.
Originally trained as an architect, Writer’s understanding of material and form continues to shape his practice. After first painting abstract landscapes as a child, he later began integrating painting into his sculptural installations, eventually developing a deeply personal language using unfired clay and acrylic on canvas. For the Triennial, he adapted a recently completed large-scale barcode installation into a desert landscape suspended between painting, sculpture and architecture.
The seven-foot-high work is composed of five-metre-long canvases stretched around freestanding wooden frames, layered with native clays, sand, grog and acrylics. Drawing from the crawling thick shinos of his soda-fired ceramics at Mandala Pottery, Writer embraces the unpredictability of drying clay surfaces, allowing them to crackle, fissure and form their own “memory lines.” Often painted through the night, the works evolve beyond his control, with pigments flowing into rivulets and canyons formed by the drying clay.
The resulting surfaces evoke an in-the-still-of-the-night, banjaric desert landscape. Embedded within them are reflections on the threats of climate change across biological, personal, cultural, microcosmic and macrocosmic scales, though none are overtly imposed upon the viewer.