Attraction, repulsion, horror and hilarity – Lou Baker’s knitted and stitched sculptures provoke a range of conflicting responses. Shapeshifting, formed through tension, gravity and movement, yet formless too, they’re fragmented, changeable, precarious. They’re immersive, alluring, yet somehow, also, uncanny.

Cloth has clear associations with comfort, the body, garments and touch. Stereotypically, hand-knitting and stitch are expected to be private, decorative, functional, perfect and finished; Baker’s work subverts these expectations. Using second hand textiles, it’s intentionally sloppy craft; rough, gestural, unfinished and often unravelling. Its skin-like, soft impermanence and associated femininities remind us of our mortality.

This darker side of Baker’s practice, however, is balanced by a brighter side of social engagement. Viewers become active participant/performers, as Living sculptures by wearing Baker’s garment-like sculptures, through co-creation and by interacting with her tactile sculptures. These engaged, bodily interactions animate Baker’s sculptures, fostering connections and improving 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 processes induce Csikszentmihalyi’s flow, a state of meditative timelessness; performative making leaves traces of her body in her work. 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.

Since 2022, she has worked with Oly Bliss, as Baker & Bliss. They have collaborated on a number of participatory projects, including a commissioned largescale, glow-in-the-dark immersive and interactive installation, Glowing and Growing.

Lou lives in Bristol, UK. She completed an MA in Fine Art at Bath Spa University in 2021 and a BA in Drawing and Applied Arts at UWE, Bristol in 2015. Her installation of red knitting, Red is the colour of… was selected for New Contemporaries 2022, she was awarded the Dreamtime Fellowship at Spike Island, Bristol in 2023-4 and she was the recipient of The Embroiderers’ Guild Scholarship 2015 (Over 30s). She joined seam collective in 2022 and is also part of Social Scaffolding Art Collective.

Website: loubakerartist.co.uk
Instagram: @loubakerartist