GLYNNIS BAKER

Glynnis Baker is a multidisciplinary artist exploring themes of death, memory, and ritual, using a wide range of materials and techniques to explore the transient nature of life. Their practice is heavily based on material exploration and complex processes.

*Due to the rapid collapse of the political climate in the past ten years, they feel responsible to also create work based on these topics. After all, we “exist in the context of all in which [we] live and what came before [us]."

I ask the question of how do we honour those before us. Is it with massive monuments, charitable foundations, or tattoos? Is it traces of ancestry that appear as I walk with my arms behind my back, like my father, like his mother, and so on? Do we take out their best coat and wrap ourselves in it on some particularly sad afternoons?

The materials I use speak to both physical and mental memory. When I draw intimate portraits of people, I use ephemeral dust: graphite, charcoal, and pastel. This media is delicate, with no guarantee of lasting without special care. My work employing more permanent materials, like stone, metal, and glass, refers to memorial structures, ancient monuments that date back centuries, if not millennia, still standing in some form. Testaments to humanity’s existence, to individual lives and stories. The metaphors are specific, targeted, and conscious: marble of headstones, lead of stone cutters, the soil of the earth, and salt of tears. The idea that holding a block of wood also implies holding a thousand suns in one's hands, or the magnitude of time that has elapsed between the formation of marble and its rude interruption to be shipped across the ocean to mark a solemn grave is both magnificent and profoundly sad.

As artists, it seems we are searching for some form of immortality by creating, by willing something into existence. It’s such a human thing to want to leave something behind, the want to be perceived - fully seen. What is bathroom graffiti if not hand petroglyphs? It is the defiant insistence in the face of an unwavering universe that I was here, I was here, I was here.