Biography
Memories and the emotions they elicit vary in intensity and clarity; some are public and shared, some are private and hidden. Exploring the gendering of materials, Lou Baker’s soft sculptures excavate the dark side of stitch, revealing and concealing alternative meanings in their folds and surfaces. She creates an uneasy tension in aesthetics by challenging the seemingly benign nature of traditional textile processes and evoking the abject.
Baker’s investigations into the transformation of materials and the sculptural and mark-making potential of stitch subvert conventional representations of the body, forging intellectual connections between material, process and concept. Using skin-like materials, she considers each stitch as a piercing and stitched drawings as tattoos; other textile techniques she regards as branding and scarification.
Through careful consideration of form, colour and complex surfaces, she blurs the boundary between visual and tactile experience and evokes a bodily presence with notions of absence and the abject.
