Lou Baker
Lou Baker was 50 when she started an Art Foundation course. She then went on to study Drawing and Applied Arts at the University of the West of England, (UWE) in Bristol. She graduated, with First Class Honours, in 2015 and was awarded an Embroiderers’ Guild Scholarship in her final year.
During her degree she continued to teach part-time at City of Bristol College, where she taught post-16 students with a range of learning disabilities. In the final year of her degree, she left teaching to focus on her art.
Lou exhibits and facilitates participatory projects regularly, through application and invitation. After graduating, she exhibited in London with a collective of her peers, Synecdoche, and then often with them in Bristol until 2020. She volunteered in a local hospital for several years, facilitating weekly sessions with patients with dementia and running Arts on Referral groups.
She graduated with an MA Fine Art (Distinction) at Bath Spa University (BSU) in 2021. During her MA she was awarded BSU’s Harbutt Fund. Since then she has been selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries, for The Holburne Open, a residency with Seam Collective, and she’s been awarded a residency at BSU’s graduate scheme, EMERGE.
It’s a question of balance. The darker side of Lou Baker’s sculptural practice is balanced by a brighter side of social engagement as she makes public things that are normally private. Balanced between form and formlessness, her shapeshifting sculptural assemblages and immersive installations 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 is about finding meaning in life. It 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.
Stereotypically, hand-knitting and stitch are functional, perfect and finished, connected with garments, domesticity, comfort and the body. Baker subverts these expectations by ‘knitting together’ materiality, process, meaning and critical thought. Making is thinking. Labour-intensive, repetitive 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 and the sculptural and mark-making potential of her intentionally sloppy craft creates an uneasy tension in aesthetics, evoking a bodily presence with notions of absence and the abject. Her works are provocations - to thought, conversation and action.
To see more of Lou’s work follow the links below: