“The works in Inner Space have evolved from two inter-related projects investigating underground space.

In the series Opal City, the visualisation is focused on the increasingly divergent adaptation of the simple mining dugout into dwellings that mimic conventional above-surface living spaces. Mainly photographed at Coober Pedy in South Australia. These photographs highlight our desire to ‘normalise’ the abnormal. The images reveal a hybridisation of building and living methodologies - mixing the reality of directly shaping the earth with the need to continue to relate to a conventional living environment.

The colour images from the second series, Commodified Mining Spaces of Kansas and Missouri, investigate the underground industrial working spaces resulting from the conversion of limestone and deep salt mines. Here the study centres on the type and nature of commodification of an otherwise marginal zone.

These series represent the first stages in an ongoing project which visually articulates the subterranean landscape in New Zealand and selected sites throughout the world”. (1)

Normalising the abnormal…Inner Space peers into Barrar’s collective ‘our’ as a scientist might peer into a petrie dish. His photographer’s eye records and reveals the hidden zones, and raises awareness of some of the impositions that occur within a broad spectrum of colonised places. These are places that have been reconfigured mechanically. They are dwellings or public spaces that exist against the odds. On one hand, the human intervention is ‘unnatural’, and on the other, such a judgement (when jobs and housing are created by intervention) would seem unfair.

The documentary evidence that Barrar presents is not harsh, and is not without humour.

In DVD Screen in Bedroom (underground house), Cooper Pedy, the underground room incorporates the essence of the sublime and (or) the ridiculous, and yet there is a simple documentary utilitarianism about this image as well.

In Large Master Bedroom (underground house), Cooper Pedy, there is a cool restraint: The bed is made, the room is presented in the manner of a standard house in a standard suburb. And yet this is a glimpse into an architectural culture that to most of us is far from ordinary. The domestic elements that make up the room are composed in an ‘ordinary’ manner inside the crazy walls that seem ignored by the regularity of the furnishings.

Barrar appears to have various agendas in the selection of his sites. But he consistently creates a subtle and definite rhetoric that layers his objectives via his fine documentary techniques.

1. Artist statement, 2004.