Parts of me, 2021, installed at the MA Degree Show, Locksbrook Campus, Bath Spa University, Bath, UK, September 2021
For more images and information about my Final Master's project, please visit EXHIBITION, AR7007
For more images and information about my Final Master's project, please visit EXHIBITION, AR7007
This website is specifically for my research during the MA in Fine Art, which I studied part-time at Bath Spa University, Bath, UK, from September 2019- September 2021. I graduated with a Distinction. Sadly, much of my time on the course was affected by the Coronavirus pandemic, but I am very grateful to the tutors, technicians and my peers for all their support and solidarity during this difficult time.
For more information about my practice generally, see my main website and follow me @loubakerartist on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. I also have an Instagram account specifically for my Living sculptures and also for my socially engaged and participatory work so follow me there too.
Artist statement:
Balanced between form and formlessness, Lou Baker’s sculptural assemblages are fragmented, changeable, precarious, unravelling. They inhabit the ambiguous spaces between a number of binaries - self/other, embodiment/disembodiment, public/private, masculine/feminine, absence/presence, comfort/discomfort and, ultimately, life and death. Boundaries provide certainty; considering them as thresholds acknowledges them as flexible which leads to disquiet and provokes a range of conflicting responses.
Baker makes visible this tension of opposites and an ongoing struggle for balance. Jung’s individuation, a process of finding meaning in life, which he says needs to occur in mid-life, involves balancing our multiple selves with the dark side, or shadow, of our self. Failure to acknowledge this shadow can result in fragmentation and associated mental health issues. It’s ultimately a preparation for death. Freud’s uncanny locates strangeness at the border between the familiar and the unfamiliar; Kristeva claims that the abject exists within these margins too, defining the self by creating a boundary between self and other.
Baker knits together materiality, process, meaning and critical thought. Making is thinking. Labour-intensive, repetitive, transformative processes induce Csikszentmihalyi’s flow, a state of meditative timelessness, leading to a deep and different way of thinking; performative making leaves traces of the form and force of her body in her work. Her research into the transformation and synthesis of materials, the change in control brought about by processes of alchemy and the sculptural and mark-making potential of her intentionally sloppy craft challenge conventional representations of the body. She creates an uneasy tension in aesthetics, evoking a bodily presence with notions of absence and the abject.
Lou Baker
November 2021
For more information about my practice generally, see my main website and follow me @loubakerartist on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. I also have an Instagram account specifically for my Living sculptures and also for my socially engaged and participatory work so follow me there too.
Artist statement:
Balanced between form and formlessness, Lou Baker’s sculptural assemblages are fragmented, changeable, precarious, unravelling. They inhabit the ambiguous spaces between a number of binaries - self/other, embodiment/disembodiment, public/private, masculine/feminine, absence/presence, comfort/discomfort and, ultimately, life and death. Boundaries provide certainty; considering them as thresholds acknowledges them as flexible which leads to disquiet and provokes a range of conflicting responses.
Baker makes visible this tension of opposites and an ongoing struggle for balance. Jung’s individuation, a process of finding meaning in life, which he says needs to occur in mid-life, involves balancing our multiple selves with the dark side, or shadow, of our self. Failure to acknowledge this shadow can result in fragmentation and associated mental health issues. It’s ultimately a preparation for death. Freud’s uncanny locates strangeness at the border between the familiar and the unfamiliar; Kristeva claims that the abject exists within these margins too, defining the self by creating a boundary between self and other.
Baker knits together materiality, process, meaning and critical thought. Making is thinking. Labour-intensive, repetitive, transformative processes induce Csikszentmihalyi’s flow, a state of meditative timelessness, leading to a deep and different way of thinking; performative making leaves traces of the form and force of her body in her work. Her research into the transformation and synthesis of materials, the change in control brought about by processes of alchemy and the sculptural and mark-making potential of her intentionally sloppy craft challenge conventional representations of the body. She creates an uneasy tension in aesthetics, evoking a bodily presence with notions of absence and the abject.
Lou Baker
November 2021
