All the babies I might have had
All the babies I might have had, 2015, leather, imitation leather, used clothing, hand knitted felt, zips, meat hook, chain; stitch, print
Attraction and repulsion, horror and hilarity; provoking a range of conflicting responses, Lou Baker’s soft sculpture, All the babies I might have had, explores taboos around childbirth – infertility, childlessness, abortion, stillbirth, miscarriage…..
Using soft, impermanent, skin-like materials in sculpture, with their associations with craft and the feminine, powerfully subverts traditional representations of the body and evokes its mortality, revealing and concealing alternative meanings in its folds and surfaces. Through careful consideration of colour, form and complex surfaces, Baker explores the gendering of materials, transforming and manipulating cloth with stitch to suggest a physical absence and, ultimately, death, the most extreme abjection.
Impaled on a meat hook and hanging from a chain, this empty leather carcass-like form creates uncomfortable notions of violence, loss and death. The uncanny parts of stitched and stuffed baby clothes emerging from large zipped openings amplifies the horror, evoking a bodily presence with notions of absence and the abject. That there are also elements of dark humour in its disturbing form increases the sense of discomfort.
Investigating the idea of stitch as tattoo, Baker uses a range of flesh coloured threads to draw onto the leather using stitch. The drawings are abstractions from a series of personal photos, memories of loss and absence. They create a troubling, hairy surface which blurs the boundaries of visual and tactile experience.
Baker’s work is intentionally provocative. She creates an uneasy tension in aesthetics by challenging the seemingly benign nature of traditional textile processes, forging intellectual connections between material, process and concept and evoking an abject response.
Attraction and repulsion, horror and hilarity; provoking a range of conflicting responses, Lou Baker’s soft sculpture, All the babies I might have had, explores taboos around childbirth – infertility, childlessness, abortion, stillbirth, miscarriage…..
Using soft, impermanent, skin-like materials in sculpture, with their associations with craft and the feminine, powerfully subverts traditional representations of the body and evokes its mortality, revealing and concealing alternative meanings in its folds and surfaces. Through careful consideration of colour, form and complex surfaces, Baker explores the gendering of materials, transforming and manipulating cloth with stitch to suggest a physical absence and, ultimately, death, the most extreme abjection.
Impaled on a meat hook and hanging from a chain, this empty leather carcass-like form creates uncomfortable notions of violence, loss and death. The uncanny parts of stitched and stuffed baby clothes emerging from large zipped openings amplifies the horror, evoking a bodily presence with notions of absence and the abject. That there are also elements of dark humour in its disturbing form increases the sense of discomfort.
Investigating the idea of stitch as tattoo, Baker uses a range of flesh coloured threads to draw onto the leather using stitch. The drawings are abstractions from a series of personal photos, memories of loss and absence. They create a troubling, hairy surface which blurs the boundaries of visual and tactile experience.
Baker’s work is intentionally provocative. She creates an uneasy tension in aesthetics by challenging the seemingly benign nature of traditional textile processes, forging intellectual connections between material, process and concept and evoking an abject response.
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