Kate Baker
Human fragility is echoed in form and content in Kate Baker's latest exhibition 'Within Matter'.
With the human body as her stimulus, Baker has created a series of large scale wall glass panels and free-standing pieces that explore a range of emotional and psychological states.
Varying in their levels of transparency and clarity, the emotively charged works present soft forms that blur and shift with the changing light. There is a solidity in the form of the glass, yet the tonal graduations of the images and layers result in ephemeral subjects.
Describing her new exhibition, Kate Baker says, “The human body in movement, in flux, abstracted and layered, at once reveals and yet masks the mental strata inherent in each of us. Themes of human fragility, complexity and the temporal nature of existence are at the heart of my interest as an artist and drive the technical and conceptual rigour within my practice.”
Baker expanded on the focus of her practice, “The process of kiln formed glass – resulting in the creation of static, sculptural and translucent form and its interdisciplinary relationship with the photographic and digital image, is the primary focus of my studio research. This direction provides for a challenging yet complex environment in which concepts of our immaterial nature can be explored, paradoxically through an intimate and rigorous engagement with the material and the resulting abstraction.”
The coupling of this technical and conceptual rigour on such a large scale presents a highly immersive and emotive exhibition that situates the viewer ‘Within Matter’.
Within Matter opens Friday 21 July at 6pm.
EXHIBITION
Kate Baker: Within Matter
15 July – 8 October 2017
National Art Glass Gallery, Wagga Wagga Art Gallery
Courtesy the artist and Wagga Wagga Art Gallery.
Pulse, the title of his current exhibition at Utopia Art Sydney, alludes to the rhythmic equilibrium of parts that has long characterised his work. As...
Visiting Venice in late June, once the champagne flutes have emptied and the holders of “professional” badges have flown home, offers a different kind of...
The curator Con Gerakaris’s considered arrangement of diverse works conjures the distinctive cultural and physical topographies of Asia. Entering A Tear in the Fabric, the...
Walking into Anna Johnson’s studio is like passing through a portal into another world: a flight of rickety wooden stairs leads to the top floor...
After winning the Fishers Ghost Open Art Award last year for her epic video installation Margaret and the Grey Mare, 2023, opportunities across the theatre,...
Co-curators and longtime friends Helen Hyatt-Johnston, Brad Buckley, and Noel Thurgate and Gallery Curator Lizzy Galloway, selected the Buddha from Harpur’s extensive collection of Ch’an...
William Kentridge’s Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot opens with the artist pacing back and forth against the backdrop of his studio, with remnants of a sketch...
To commemorate fifty years since the invasion, Savvas travelled to Cyprus to video her walk from her mother’s home in Kaimakli, Nicosia, to her father’s...
National museums serve as custodians of collective memory. They preserve, interpret, and present stories that shape a nation’s cultural identity. The National Museum of Australia...