Hilary J Baker

The cult of the relic is back with with us today, and the power for a relic to enthrall is not at all diminished.

In the Middle Ages, the dead who had lived exceptionally holy lives, became unbelievably powerful. Grisly items hewn from the bodies, hair, teeth of such individuals (even breast milk) were, and still are, housed in great buildings, shrines and bejewelled reliquary. Acts of ingenious thiefdom captured them, and enormous journeys were made to venerate them; the super rich collected relics with an obsession that they now reserve for contemporary art and luxury cars and yachts.

King Canute felt he was visiting the Apostles themselves when he visited the Sactuaries of St Paul and St Mark in Rome; pilgrims who were liars and that hung the bell of Irish St Cuileain around their necks, were reported to having been savagely strangled by its chord; a more peaceful transparent reliquary is even said to hold the blood, sweat and tears of Christ.

By the late 14th Century the cult of relics was seen as decadent, and claims of their power widely ridiculed. Their value also plummetted due to a vast swathe of relic forgeries – the Reformer Calvin protested that there were enough pieces of the true Cross in circulation to build a boat.

Now, in the 21st Century, relics are back big time.

Today, a piece of Elvis Presley’s jump suit of the 1970s that was deliberately cut up as individual pieces of memorabilia, would reach upwards of $45,000. A chair from the old Wembley Stadium, one of 100,000, have sold on Ebay for £250. No-one truly knows the actual resting place of the body of Princess Diana for fear of relic hunters.

The relics of the past that were empowered by their closeness to spiritual superstars have now been replaced by relics used and touched by movie stars, musicians, sports stars and celebrities. Virtual reality makes us hunger to touch the real thing.

It is alleged that someone actually now owns George Best’s liver? Paintings on canvas by the ‘big ‘artists have surged in value because they are made from brushstrokes made by the hand of the Artist . Even items thrown out as garbage by the rich and famous are slavaged and collected.

Relic collectors are out there in huge numbers, many have big money at their disposal, and they all need to fill their shrines. No longer do they need to steal or plunder, or journey to a foreign land – they just need  a phone.

And those that wish to service the needs of today’s pilgrims and those starved of reality , can build Museums and Galleries to house and show their relic collections, and sell reproductions of the real things.

Pilgrims and small time collectors can even stay at home to hunt down their own piece of relic on Ebay and have it delivered to their door. A shrine can now be a bedroom: a reliquary a cardboard box.

Everyone is now within a palpable touching distance of someone that they venerate.

Pythagoras said that dust was a substance between the visible and the invisible; particles of dust are souls of the air. Andy Goldworthy’s thrown snow in the crystal air dematerialised in the wind, his stone pigment melted into river water, my studio’s dust is blown and unsettled from its soft slumber by an icy draft.

Using paper masks and pin holes in paper screens, I am capturing forms and shapes of escaping dust, both in moving images and as formal patterning.

For the last 6 months I have been collating a small daily relic; a substance, fragment or found object that evokes a memory of each day. I put each relic in a test tube sealed with a natural cork bung.

Each test tube is a relic and is hung in turn, using plaited hair, on a wrought iron double spiral frame.

This will create a double spiral Relic Chandelier .

This sculptural form will be disconnected from the ground in order to void the connection between the body and ground; a spiritual and venerated space between heaven and earth.

An early memory I have always had is of being ‘stuck’ to the ground by a powerful weightiness, unable to pull myself into the air, into that space.

The artist Alexander Calder, known for his mobile sculptures, has had his work described as ‘hovering, polychromatic trinkets’. My chandelier will shimmer with my captured personal detritus of memory and experience; a reliquary of the air.

Pushing forward with my forensic etching technique, I am anxious to increase the size and scale of works, using a single plate rather than multiples.

For imagery, I have made many lensless photographic silhouettes of my body together with scattered images of eclectic personal items following Judd’s method of bringing specific objects ‘nearer to painting’.

Involving the detritus of an individual in the process of etching goes towards the requirement for reality; this is not real; this is real.

Sigmund Freud compared the work of the archaeologist to that of a psychoanalyst uncovering layer after layer of the patients psyche. I need to add layer upon layer of salvaged material, building up a textured skin of intrinsically personal surface.

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The Gallery at The Museum in the Park, Stroud, from Sunday 7th November until Sunday 28th November 2010.

To download a printable version of this invitation please click here, then ‘save as…’

www.museuminthepark.org.uk

Internationally acclaimed artist Hilary Baker’s latest ‘body’ of work is exactly that – a unique challenge to the supposed sterility and isolation of today’s living spaces using bodily residues.

Hilary, whose work is commissioned worldwide including in the National Portrait Gallery in London, uses etchings, paintings, ceramics and sculptures to articulate how all bodies leave visible traces of their interrelation within an environment.

In her exhibition, FOAM, Hilary challenges the supposed sterility and isolation of today’s living spaces.

She explains: “I use a wide range of methods to visually record traces of life; a form of creative forensic archaeology.

“The concept of non-separability and how at each moment everything that seems to exist is in a dynamic flow of interaction, challenges the notions of a today’s singular, cellular, foam-like society.”

Hilary uses hair, blood, saliva and other bodily residues to develop her etching plates, and a body’s heat, energy and shadow, and even breath, is captured to form her 3D works. Figures are shown pressed onto the canvas, and faces evolve from elaborately textured prints. Sound jars are scoured with vibrations of voices and breath is captured in frozen foam.

Jung put forward a notion that a body’s shadow is a ‘bag’ that holds all our physical detritus – Hilary takes this idea and for this exhibition has created shadows of chimney soot that explode across the gallery floor.

You can see FOAM in The Gallery at The Museum in the Park, Stroud, from Sunday 7^th November until Sunday 28^th November 2010.

Please contact Hilary on 07796 092262 for more information about FOAM or visit www.museuminthepark.org.uk for a map and directions to the Gallery.

Throughout history artists have drawn, sculpted and painted the human form.  Recently artists have not only used the body as the ‘content’ of the work, but also as the canvas, brush, frame and creative platform.

During the 1950’s , 60′s  and 70′s the focus in painting shifted from the formal object to the action or process involved in creating, and artists developed a more direct contact with the materials that they used.  As the physical body became increasingly visible in the painting, some artists used the body itself as a brush or canvas.

The body itself as a creative tool became increasingly present in the work of artists such as Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg and Carolee Schneemann, who relocated the ‘site’ of painting from the surface of the canvas to a three-dimensional environment, in which painting and events ‘happened’.

The artist’s body also began to be used as the primary signifying material of the artist’s gesture, making the body a site on which ideas could be enacted.  Everyday acts and gestures were shown as art and the rethinking of bodily actions through their artistic enactment opened up an alternative reconstruction of thoughts, beliefs and commentary on race, class and gender.

The ceremonial and shamanistic practices of other cultures also influenced many artists.  Sacrifice, ritual and social and bodily transgression were increasingly used as creative experiences for both artist and audience.  Violence, suffering and self-degredation were often employed by artists in their actions.  French critic Francois Pluchart suggests that these actual bodily risks taken by artists in their performances change established ways of thinking about society, so affecting and challenging social norms.

More recent works using the body can be seen as a reaction to early Conceptual Art which tried to remove direct experience from the artwork.  This does not mean that the body has been re-used as some kind of expression or that the work is a solitary celebration of ‘self’.  The body is often used as a tool (Richard Long walking to make marks in the landscape),  the body is sometimes a place (Oppenheim’s Body Works), or the body is a prop (Bruce Nauman’s Fountain photograph) or (Joseph Beuy’s How to explain a Painting to a Dead Hare).

For artists such as Bruce Nauman, Dennis Oppenheim and Vito Acconci, among others, there was a need to go back and explore the primary source material, their own bodies.  Marcel Duchamp decided to work directly on his own body, Jackson Pollock put his own physicality in his work, ‘Happenings’ in the 1970s presented artists opportunities to use their bodies as props for performances.  Bruce Nauman incorporated his body into the whole conception of his artwork. The body never actually went away.

Artists who use the body today alternate between the presentation of states of intense body sensation and extreme cerebral detachment.  There is also often an attempt to give a message about our interaction in society and with our environment. Much new work is still performative and temporary and ephemeral in nature and explores the nature of ‘self ‘ – perhaps this new creative drive is to make the impermenance of life visable, and to explore the concept that a person is not just a body; but that a person has a body.

‘ they seemed to spend a great deal of time eating and drinking and going to parties, and Frensic, whose appearance tended to limit his sensual pleasures to putting things into himself rather than into other people, was something of a gourmet.’

Tom Sharp (1977)

The novelist Tom Sharp suggests that most human experiences are caused simply by playing around with one’s own bodily boundaries, or by playing around with someone else’s ….. this will form the next basis for my own creative exploration and the next exhibition…..

Watch this space.

Inspirations are wide and various; Francis Bacon, Glenn Brown and Helen Chadwick for my past commissioned work , and more recently by the voyeuristic experimentation of Marcel Duchamp, the post modernist exploration of time and memory by Cornelia Parker, the maternal fetishism work of Mary Kelly together with the screen print ‘Head forms’ of Bill Turnbull and printmaking exponent Ingred Ledent.

Inspired by the Jewish Museum in Berlin, designed by the radical educator and architect Daniel Libeskind,  my work has been driven in a new and dynamic direction, that of the underlying processes and the exploration of the conscious and unconscious visual memory of individuals, and the structure of societies.

Other influences include Janine Antoni, who is interested in converting everyday body rituals into sculptural processes, which prompted me into experimenting with paper made from the contents of my vacuum cleaner.  Mona Hartum’s use of her own body as a reference point for political and ambivalent symbols of individual existence, also led me into using my own body with different photographic processes and hair as a medium for stitching.

Sigmar Polke made a series of large gestural paintings in the 1980s that used toxins in his paint that continued to react after the paintings were ‘finished’. This echoed the layered weathered patina of my work ‘Lead Scrolls’ .

Cornelia Parker’s enquiries into the resonances that ordinary things acquire through association intensified when her work showed what was not present in objects – grooves in records, negative spaces in words and spaces under stools. This encouraged me to develop ‘sound jars’ to capture voices and vibrations of individuals.

The work of the Bookart movement and the early Bookart practitioners Buzz Spector, Stella Waitzkin and Claire Van Vliet in particular have inspired my diary format Bookart pieces.

I am a member of The Rodd Printmaking Group in Prestigne and am continually inspired by techniques used by fellow members.   

I am also collaborating with Lin Charlston, a fellow member at The Rodd, who is a leading conceptual practitioner in Bookart, to develop the format of the FOAM catalogue.

Following on from exploring traces left by individuals, I have been researching the notion of many individuals in today’s societies being increasingly self-protective and conscious of the invasion of personal space, infectious manifestations and threats to emotional and bodily health and safety.

Sociologist Thomas Mayne coined the term ‘Connected Isolation’ during the early 1970′s to describe the emergence of individuals’ percieved need to create specific human interiors - which externalise to form protective existential spaces around themselves.

These spaces in turn have expanded to include the total space that people inhabit – isolated and controlled sterile bubbles of existence.

German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk wrote the trilogy ‘Spharen’ (Spheres) between 1998 and 2004 that traces this sociological development from ‘Bubbles’ to ‘Globes’ then to ‘Foam’.  He describes the multiplicities of modern life in terms of Foam Making – all individuals are living in specific bubbles within communicating foam, a spatialized immune system – the bubble immunizes against the influences and percieved threats of the outer world but simultaneously links with the social and commercial world through the media, mobile phones and the internet.

I have noticed increasing anxiety in many homes for  high levels of cleanliness, tidyness and lack of clutter or individualistic belongings – all of which is fed by product promotion and mass stylisation, whilst the media causes increased anxiety by propigating scare stories of physical and viral threats.

This has led to the seeming need for individuals to have the least possible interraction with their environment, leaving either few physical or personal traces through detritus or possessions.

My new work tries to show that it is impossible for an individual not to leave traces of life, as there is an incessant interaction that determines our reality and the conditions of our existence. 

I am now exploring how to capture the interactions of change and exchange between a living body and its environment through a wide range of methods and media.

As Robert Rauchenberg stated in 2008 ‘ A painting is more like the real world if it is made out of the real world’.  I am attempting to define the transient nature and nonseperability of life using actual traces left by individuals of their interraction with their environment.

As it is stated in Buddhism, the observer and the observed can’t be separated. They interact and shape each other in a global universe, just like two knives sharpening each other. We are structured by our environment, just as we affect our world through our projections, concepts and habits.

‘ The river is within us, the sea is all about us:

mysterious processes of change and exchange,

We shall not cease from exploring

And the end of exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.’

Little Gidding, Four Quartets. T.S. Elliot

The surface of the printing plates used for each individual set of etchings are used to make imprints onto the surface of a piece of lead which is then manipulated to form a sculpted head or figure. 

Lead Sculpture

Each sculpture suggests an individual’s unconscious relationship to the space that they inhabit both internally and externally.  The surface of each sculptured fragment also shows an additional and individual vivid physical record. 

Found objects from an individual’s personal space are also used as a base for resist etching and then used in the construction of a 3D shape.