Made flesh at Corridor Collaboration with Lola Bennett, in The Corridor at Spike Island
(Click for full image)
Made flesh 2024 is an installation of all (my) flesh coloured sculptures, knitted and stitched between 2020 and 2023. They were installed site responsively, with some used netting, as a walkthrough, immersive installation at The Corridor, a test space at Spike Island, Bristol from Sept 10-16 2024, as a showcase at the end of my Dreamtime Fellowship.
The exhibition was a collaboration with Lola Bennett, the Bath Spa University Graduate Fellow. We shared Studio 26 with the three UWE Graduate Fellows from Sept 2023-October 2024. Lola exhibited her exquisite and quirky ceramic sculptures at the other end of the corridor.
Here's a walkthrough video:
My installation is an ensemble of several series and works which have previously been exhibited in other settings:
Exhibition statement:
Corridor Collaboration
Dreamtime Fellow, Lou Baker
& Bath Spa University Graduate Fellow,
Lola Bennett present a showcase of their recent work as the grand finale to their Fellowship year at Spike Island.
Instantly, the contrasts between these two practices are evident, most obviously in their use of materials, but also in the aesthetics of their work.
Lola has created an otherworldly installation of exquisitely crafted, quirky and conceptual ceramic vessels. Their intricate, illustrative surface decoration adds poignancy to the title of her work, I’ve got no one to invite to dinner.
Lou’s dreamlike den, Made flesh, on the other hand, is intentionally ‘sloppy craft’ abstract and formless, unfinished and unravelling. Knitting and stitch should be comforting yet there’s something disquieting about this maximalist, fleshy installation. And, in stark contrast to the PLEASE DON’T TOUCH extreme fragility of Lola’s work, Lou invites the viewer to PLEASE TOUCH, to add to and even to wear her work; to become part of it.
Despite these differences, there are in fact significant connections between these two artists’ practices. Both are makers, both are sculptors and both are obsessive.
They also both use highly skilled, labour-intensive craft processes to create their own
idiosyncratic contemporary fine art.
Lou Baker, Made flesh, 2021-24, research & development
This installation is made to be touched.
Normally in an art gallery there are signs saying, ‘Please don’t touch.’ What happens if visitors are invited to not only touch but also to add to the work and become part of the art through performance?
Knitting and stitch have clear associations with comfort, garments and the body. Cloth surrounds us and accompanies us from the moment we’re born till the day we die. It’s like a second skin. Trend forecaster, Li Edelkoort, predicted that the increased use of screens in our lives would make us crave touch and tactility. She said, ‘super technology is going to ask for super tactility’ (2012).
Knitting and stitch are expected to be decorative, functional, private, perfect and finished. My intentionally ‘sloppy craft’, which is gestural and often unfinished and unravelling, subverts these expectations. It’s alluring, yet somehow, also, uncanny; shapeshifting, formlessness and vulnerable. Its soft impermanence and associated femininities remind us of our mortality.
Most of us made dens when we were young, with blankets and washing racks and our imagination, that gap under the hedge at the bottom of the garden or the space under the bed. It was fun, it was play. Often it was about cosiness, comfort, hiding, being unseen, invisible to the eyes of supervising adults; sometimes it was about privacy and having a space of one’s own. Sometimes, however, there was also a frisson of fear at the prospect of being unseen or forgotten….
Made flesh is part of my ongoing research. It synthesises the four strands of my practice - sculpture, installation, performance and social engagement. It brings together several series of sculptures that I knitted in the year leading up to the deaths of my frail, elderly parents. It also includes five stitched sculptures which I made after their deaths, using some of their clothes, bedding and towels, stitched together with some of my unfinished sculptures. My transitional objects or my Frankenstein’s monsters? Making has helped me process the complexities of grief.
This work explores the ambiguous spaces between a number of binaries: self / other, embodiment / disembodiment, absence / presence, comfort / discomfort, order / disorder, inside / outside, form / formlessness, impermanence /permanence, public/private, and, ultimately, life and death.
Anthropologist Mary Douglas suggests that ‘boundaries provide certainty; considering them as thresholds acknowledges them as flexible which leads to disquiet and a range of conflicting responses.’ She says that this ambiguity prompts ‘not only danger, but also power’ (1966).
I make public things that are normally private. The darker side of my sculptural practice is balanced by a brighter side of social engagement; it’s as if I ‘knit together’ materials and ideas with people and places, even when there’s no knitting involved. Sensory, immersive, and often body-like, my works are provocations - to thought, conversation and action.
Douglas, M (1966) Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, Routledge and Kegan Paul