Attraction, repulsion, horror and hilarity – Lou Baker’s sculptures provoke a range of conflicting responses. Shapeshifting between form and formlessness, they’re fragmented, changeable, precarious, unravelling. Given form through tension and gravity, and installed site-responsively in unexpected public spaces, her work becomes what anthropologist Mary Douglas describes as ‘matter out of place’. It’s immersive, alluring, yet somehow, also, uncanny.
Red is the colour of... 2019-2021, hand knitted wool,
installed at New Contemporaries 2022, Humber Street Gallery, Hull, 23 Sept-27 Nov. 2022
Cloth accompanies and surrounds us from the moment we’re born till the day we die; it has clear associations with comfort, the body, garments and touch. Stereotypically, hand-knitting and stitch are regarded as ‘women’s work’ and expected to be private, decorative, functional, perfect and finished; Baker’s work subverts these expectations. Predominantly using second hand or stashed textiles which are imbued with history and memories, and sometimes combined with concrete and steel, her work is sculptural and conceptual. It’s intentionally sloppy craft; rough, gestural, unfinished and often unravelling. Its skin-like, soft impermanence and associated femininities remind us of our mortality.
Baker’s work investigates 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. Douglas suggests that boundaries provide certainty; considering them as thresholds acknowledges them as flexible which leads to disquiet.
Baker makes visible a 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. Sigmund Freud’s uncanny locates strangeness at the border between the familiar and the unfamiliar; Julia Kristeva claims that the abject exists within these margins too, defining the self by creating a boundary between self and other.
This darker side of Baker’s practice, however, is balanced by a brighter side of social engagement. Viewers are invited to be active participant/performers, becoming Living sculptures by wearing Baker’s garment-like sculptures, through co-creation and by interacting with her irresistibly tactile sculptures which are made to be touched. Baker’s sculptures are animated by the presence of these engaged bodies and the embodied interactions foster connection, build community and improve wellbeing.
Through her expanded sculptural practice - incorporating installation, performance and social engagement - Baker knits together materiality, process, meaning and critical thought with people and places. Making is thinking. Labour-intensive, repetitive and transformative processes induce Csikszentmihalyi’s flow, a state of meditative timelessness, leading to deep and different ways 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. Her work is a provocation to thought, conversation and action.
Much of her work doesn’t fit easily into just one category, but for this website it’s divided into the following areas:
For images and more details about each part of her practice, please click on the appropriate link. For regular updates please follow her on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.
Enjoy!
March 2025