Lou Baker MRSS

Statement: 

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, gravity and movement, 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.

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 pieces, through co-creation and by interacting with her irresistibly tactile works, 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.

Biography:

Lou describes becoming an artist as a very positive form of mid-life crisis. When her only child started sixth form, Lou decided that she needed something to focus on, other than her work as a teacher, so she enrolled on an Art Foundation course at Bristol School of Art. There she quickly realised that the knitting and stitching skills she took for granted transferred readily to making sculpture.... and she was hooked!

She subsequently went on to do a BA in 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 the Embroiderers’ Guild Scholarship (Over 30s) in her final year.

During her degree she continued to teach but in her final year she left teaching to focus on her art. In her penultimate year, she exhibited in London with a collective of her peers, Synecdoche, and then often with them in Bristol until 2020.

In 2019, her 60th year, she started an MA in Fine Art at Bath Spa University (BSU). She graduated with Distinction in 2021. During her MA she was awarded BSU’s Harbutt Fund, for Social Knitwork 2021. For details of her MA research please visit her MA Fine Art research website.

Since then she has been selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2022, for The Holburne Open with seam collective and she was awarded a year’s residency at BSU’s Graduate scheme, EMERGE for 2022-23. She was selected for the Dreamtime Fellowship 2023-24, a year's residency in a shared studio at Spike Island, Bristol sponsored by Luke Jerram. She has just completed the New Platform Art Professional Development Programme for 2024-25.

Over the past 10 years, she has exhibited widely and has undertaken a number of commissions, residencies and socially engaged projects. Notably, she was part of two Arts Council-funded exhibition tours in 2023/24, one with Social Scaffolding and the other, A Visible THREAD, with seam collective. In 2024, she collaborated with Oly Bliss on two commissions, as Baker & Bliss. They developed Glowing and Growing, a largescale, glow-in-the-dark immersive and interactive installation, firstly for Severn Arts for Light Night, Worcester in February and then for Enlighten, in Accrington, Lancashire in October.  

Very aware of the wellbeing benefits of making art, she is interested in art as therapy, for herself but also for others. She volunteered for a couple of years at Southmead hospital with Fresh Arts, facilitating art sessions for elderly patients with dementia. She’s been involved with some research into Arts on Referral too, delivering sessions for other patient groups for wellbeing. She also helped to organise a series of 6 exhibitions with Synecdoche in the main hospital atrium from 2016-2018.  

She’s still actively involved in seam collective who have another ambitious project planned for August 2025. 

Please visit Lou's website for more information about her practice. For details of work created before 2019, please visit her Archive.