Spotlight on kerri barrie

Tailgater, Kerri Barrie’s astonishing entry - part couture, part 1940’s motor vehicle - was selected, judged and awarded at the 2024 World of Wearable Art, a coveted international extravaganza in Wellington, New Zealand.

Tailgater by Kerri Barrie
Photographer: Alma Sarhan #almasarhanphotography

Her wearable vision evolved from deconstructed car components - taillights, steel, aluminum and Perspex, a fusion of automotive innovation and timeless elegance.

It took an obsessional four months to design and piece together with exacting skills and engineering solutions. Trade expertise like plastic welding, was taken on with unwavering proficiency.

Fortunately for us, Kerri is jaded by sameness; she thrives on art which challenges conventional learning, she taunts standard thinking.

Consider the devotion to the hidden, inner facets, each as striking as the glamourous exterior.

Tailgater demanded the dissection of car lights, new skills and processes to build a ‘garment’ of non-pliable materials. She learned to weld plastic, to make the wearable art ‘move to the music like the cover of a magazine’, the encore of a catwalk collection.

Curiously, Kerri felt discouraged from making wearable things as a textile major at art school. She believed she had to work harder to be considered a legitimate artist. Now, she counters (in word and output) any notion that art is limited to the wall.

‘There are different forms of creativity. I want people to know that being an artist isn’t just being a painter’.

She cites as formative the pageantry and scale of mesmerizing costumes at Notting Hill Carnival in London, and Cirque de Soleil. A 5-year Artist-in-Residency at the Green School in Bali evolved sustainable merchandise from the mountains of refuse, into the international shopper market there.    

The other 180 degrees of her creative personality is doll making and workshops.

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