Orla Barry's  work focuses on language, both written and spoken, as well as on visual deconstruction and displacement of language; via frequently associative techniques, she researches the semantics of her mother tongue and its cultural imbedding and implications. Her work is strongly poetic and lyrical, crossing a wide variety of media, evoking non-linear narratives, undercurrents of emotion and dealing with themes as linguistic intoxication, proximity and distance, melancholy and frivolity, friendship and family and what unites or divides us. She works in many forms, including performance, video, text, sound, and photographic installations.