Barbara Weir (1940–2023) was inspired in her career by the dynamic community of artists at Utopia and the work of her adopted auntie Emily Kame Kngwarreye. Emily’s work had a profound impact on her and in the early 1990s she began seriously to explore her artistic talents.
Barbara is known for her highly compelling abstract canvases that masterfully evoke a timeless illusion of depth and subtle rhythmic movement and uses two distinctive stylistic conventions, one linear, the other an all-over dotting technique. For her Grass Seed Dreamings, she uses the linear style. The story refers to the grass seed that forms part of the bush tucker found in the region, which is collected, crushed into a fine powder and used to make bread. With these paintings she combines both aerial and side-on view to describe dense fields of swaying grass in close focus. These are both diaphanous and mysterious in impact. Exquisite linear layers of finely painted filaments, they seem at once to be appearing and disappearing setting up pulsating rhythms which are further accentuated by soft plays of flowing colour that weaves gently into and over the canvas surface.
Her work is in the public collections of Art Gallery of South Australia (Adelaide, Australia); National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne, Australia); Art Gallery of Queensland (Brisbane, Australia) among others.