Clio Barnard was selected as part of the 2006 open call for proposals from Artangel and Jerwood which resulted in her film, The Arbor in 2010. She was later on the judging panel for the open call in both 2013 and 2014.
Barnard is an artist filmmaker whose work has shown in cinemas, international film festivals and galleries including Tate Modern, Tate Britain and MoMA, New York. Her work has been screened on Channel 4 and had several international broadcasts.
Clio Barnard’s work is concerned with the relationship between fictional film language and documentary. She has often dislocated sound and image by constructing fictional images around verbatim audio. In The Arbor actors lip-synch to the voices of real people, questioning documentary’s aspiration to collapse the distance between reality and representation. Her films include: Plotlands (Whitstable Biennale), Road Race(Film London), Random Acts of Intimacy (BFI/Channel 4) and Headcase (Arts Council England / Channel 4). Barnard is also one of the winners of the Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists and, for The Arbor, winner of the Best New Documentary Filmmaker award at the Tribeca Film Festival 2010.
The Arbor is part of The Artangel Collection. Following its premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York in April 2011, The Arbor was screened at cinemas across the UK. It has since been seen at Tate Britain in February 2014 , at ICA in September 2015 and the Belfast Film Festival in April 2018.