Terri Russell Barker is a multimedia artist based in Naarm (Melbourne) Australia. Terri works across drawing, painting, sculpture, and video moving between mediums in response to the felt demands of each idea. Her practice is led by the belief that form and material are integral to meaning. Each medium offers a distinct way of being with an idea and how it translates and communicates.

Terri often finds her practice in the deeper psyche of the human condition. Informed by her practice as a psychologist and her own lived experience as a woman, she explores relationships between embodied and intuitive knowledge and the broader social, cultural, and political contexts within which it exists.

At times explicitly activist, her approach often emerges as moments of urgency, anger, or protest. A response to current events. She uses her work to question, challenge, and resist, creating space for critical reflection and dialogue. To explore and understand what is yet unknown or to say something that is struggling to be said or heard. By confronting these tensions, she encourages viewers to reconsider their own assumptions.

Her work ultimately invites sustained attention and reflection, opening possibilities for alternative ways of seeing, understanding, and engaging with the world.

Terri studied Visual Communication at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) between 1980-1983. Through further study she became a registered psychologist in 2001. Terri draws from earlier career roles in design, animation, video, and event production.