Hilary J Baker

This fresco reflects the effect of light in an environment.  I used encaustic materials and a hot irons to reflect a piercing of light.

Encaustic fresco

As my husband is was born in the former Republic of Yugoslavia and our son Nicholas is half Yugoslavian, we feel that, as a family, we have many traces of our existance in Croatia and Serbia.

I made this Bookart piece using found objects during a visit to Porec.  I used the various found objects as resists to an enamelling process on copper pages.  The pages fold out to make a cross as a reflection on the many iconic imagery in Croatia, and the book’s cover is embossed with cyrillic lettering.

I can’t remember when my hands started dripping – nor when my feet started dripping too.  But throughout my life, I have left trails of sweaty fingerprints behind on everything I touch and footprints where I walk barefoot.

This perhaps is why visible human traces form the basis of my creative work.

‘All Strung Up’ is a series of works on paper that reflect this personal experience.

Using a raised embossing plate of an enlargement of my  fingerprint, I made prints using paper and a steam roller!  The embossed print was embellished with soot taken from my chimney – the final piece will be strung on a cast-iron frame using twine through eyelets piercing the edges of the print.

There is are known legends about how some ancient ceramic pots were early phonic recordings; the grooves around the pots being incised by vibrating reeds which, when the clay was still wet, scratch the vibrations of voices and sounds.

Although no recordings have been ‘played’ from these ancient pots, 19th Century phonographs were made in a similar way and vinyl records use grooves to record sound.

To record the vibrations of a voice,  I have been working in collaboration with ceramic artist Patrick Smith to make Raku fired ‘Sound Jars’.

These Sound Jars have been made for the exhibition FOAM utilising specially devised foaming glazes.

Based on drawings of body prints made with photographic emulsion, these large multi-textural paintings evoke a layered impression of a human form, an archaeological residue of the presence of an individual.

Using a mixture of oil paints, soot, clay and charcoal, the paintings develop over many weeks and the overall imagery evolves and dissipates with each layer, until the impression of the form evolves.

Intaglio Prints and Mono Prints

A series of prints are made by a process devised from natural resists gathered from the residues of vibrations and secretions made by an individual in an environment; sweat, skin, saliva, blood, phlegm…..  and a few more!

These gestural, semi-figurative mono prints and etchings mix traditional intaglio methods with modern materials and natural resists. 

The resulting textured plates make up together a series of semi-figurative gestural intaglio prints and mono prints, with each plate printed individually, pieced together or overprinted.

Each printing series is developed from a single individual’s salvaged residues so that the resulting images are singular and unique to that person; in effect a true captured likeness.

The intaglio prints are taken from aluminium plates etched with copper sulphate saline solution, the mono-prints are made from hand made paper, card and natural fibres.  All inks are water based and the plates are printed on to a variety of hand made papers.

This is a video showing work in progress by Special Effects Designer Alistair Fitz-Desorgher, who I am developing a Bookart piece in collaboration with for my exhibitian FOAM.

My work centres on the body as subject and object, and its interaction with the space that it inhabits.

Within this exhibition, FOAM, I am challenging the notions of today’s singular, cellular, foam-like society and the supposed sterility and isolation of today’s living spaces.

Using etchings, paintings, ceramics and sculptures, I articulate how all bodies leave visible traces of their interrelation with an environment.

I am continually challenged to develop various methods of recording an individual’s interaction with the space that they inhabit, and their own particular traces; a form of creative forensic archaeology.  This concept of non- seperability and how at each moment, everything that exists, even the individual person, is in a dynamic flow of interaction, forms the basis of this work on show.

Using hair, blood, saliva and other bodily residues to develop etching plates, and a body’s heat, energy and shadow and even breath to make 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 – I have taken this idea and for this exhibition I will create shadows of chimney soot that explode across the gallery floor.

I will also be showing work that has been produced in collaboration with ceramic artist Patrick Smith, and Special Effects Technitian Alistair Fitz-Desorgher.

You will be able to view FOAM at The Gallery, The Museum in the Park, Stroud, Gloucestershire from 6th November until 30^th November 2010

Early traces

One of the first memories I have is of sitting in my big old fashioned pram, drawing – it was my space, my own creative world.

I spent hours as a child making things from paper using sellotape and scissors, none have survived, but I remember how I could escape into another place where cutting, folding and sticking forms and shapes made a different reality.

Dripping Hands

I can’t remember when my hands started dripping – nor when my feet started dripping too. 

I was taken to see a specialist and at that time there was only one kind of treatment available – a cut in the set of nerves in my back – a treatment that seemed so drastic that I could vividly imagine drying up like a prune.

Drawing and writing became more difficult as I grew older.  My hands would melt the paper and the sweat would dissolve the marks that I made in pen. 

The strange thing was, the more creative I felt and tried to be, the worse the sweating became; sewing was impossible, knitting was a torture, origami produced only papier-mâché blobs.  Scraper boards gave me an escape for a while and so did painting, but it was only when I began stage set painting in my teens that I found a new creative output. 

Working on a huge scale using big brushes and large images, cutting out hardboard with a jigsaw and making life-size props gave me a new physical creative freedom. Sellotape and scizzors became lifesize sculptures!

Leaving Traces

Being conscious of my sweatiness, I am sure looking back, led me to develop an inbuilt awareness of visible traces that I left behind.  This also began a keen interest in archaeology and how an individual leaves identifiable traces behind in an environment. This in turn, developed into a plan for me to study archaeology and archaeological illustration at Bristol University.

Art Track

Sadly, my Father died suddenly when I was 18, and having to stay at home with my Mother instead of going to Bristol University, I chose to do the Foundation Art Course at Cheltenham Art College. I continued my interest in the ‘individual’ and developed my artwork in the direction of memory and traces, objects and their owners, physical likeness and personal environments.

Mixed Media on board

I continued to develop this theme by completing a Degree in Fine Art at Sheffield Art College majoring in etched and litho imagery, which proved another form of creative freedom unaffected by my sweaty hands.

A continuing interest in human archaeology, together with an ability to capture an individual’s likeness in a wide variety of media led me into working towards new forms of portraiture.  During the 1980s and 1990s I travelled extensively working on private and public commissions, but my interest in traces and residues continued and I developed a body of experimental work.

The Transience of Objects

Many people recognise visible traces as objects and things belonging to and used by an individual.  I grew up in a world, however, where everyday objects in the home, furniture, curtains, carpets, and pictures were all transient and for sale.  My Father was an antiques dealer and although he had a showroom, if someone came to the house and liked something and the price was right then they could take it with them!

I have always been grateful to have grown up surrounded by a huge variety of fascinating objects in an unattached way, and because they were transient and ever changing, I was eager to examine them closely and intensely, especially looking and feelings for signs of the history of previous ownership, or more accurately, custodianship.

Because of this, the idea of transience and continual change also resonates deeply within me.  I have always sensed particular resonances and vibrations emanating from objects that I hold in my sweaty palms.  Stones can feel very different to me – hot, cold, fizzing even, but quartz I find more uncomfortable to hold more than any other substance.

Now that I look back, the interrelationships between the energy of objects, living things and their environment has always been a developing theme in my work.  The space that an individual leaves behind, the residues of life that has been lived, a trail left by a moving force and the interrelationships in the environment that they develop, has always formed the basis of my work and interests.

Interrelationships

Nagarjuna, the 2nd Century Indian philosopher said ” The nature of phenomena is that of mutual dependence; in themselves, phenomena are nothing at all.”

Relationships determine our reality, the conditions of our existence, and we are all structured by our environment, just as we affect our world through our projections, concepts and habits.

This concept of interdependence has led me to develop my work further to describe the dynamic flow of incessant interactions between a body and it’s environment and to capture the trace of mysterious processes of change and exchange.

Marcel Duchamp said ‘Each second, each breath is a work which is inscribed nowhere.’ I have set out to challenge this notion by finding new methods to record a body’s presence through substance, symbolically through form and method, but leaving the body absent in reality.

To achieve this I have developed a new etching technique whereby a series of prints are made by a process devised from natural resists gathered from the residues of vibrations and secretions made by an individual in an environment; sweat, skin, saliva, blood, phlegm …..  and a few more!

These gestural, semi-figurative mono prints and etchings mix traditional intaglio methods with modern materials and natural resists. 

5 Etching plate print

The resulting textured plates make up together a series of semi-figurative gestural intaglio prints and mono prints, with each plate printed individually, pieced together or overprinted.

Each printing series is developed from a single individual’s salvaged residues so that the resulting images are singular and unique to that person; in effect a true captured likeness.