Emily A Baker

latex, steel, stoneware, cast iron free weights, 2019

Baker employs materials such as latex, steel and cast iron to investigate themes of the body, specifically athleticism, injury, and repair, pulling from her background as a competitive gymnast. She is showcasing a new body of work, suspending steel forms with latex skins, pushing the materials to their physical limits.

cast iron, latex, resin bonded sand, steel, 2019

The goal of this work was to capture the visible stretch seen in surgical tubing and athletic resistance bands in iron. The original part was made of surgical tubing and for a while now this rubber tubing has represented the ligaments and tendons in my body. By casting them in iron, it feels as though I am hardening them as a strange attempt to protect my own tendons, specifically the ones in my right ankle. Eventually, the water based latex will begin to rust the iron, allowing a new color and texture to creep up, alluding to time and aging.  

This work references my time in physical therapy for an injury in which reoccurrence feels inevitable. 

In this work, I left part of the sand molds that created the iron tube casts. It felt as though it further protected the piece, further projected the ligament. Since it is meant to be discarded, the mode of creation is now elevated in its new steel jacket.

cast glass, cast iron, steel, walnut, bronze, 2018

This work was conceived during the first few days of the Thomas Fire which started in Ventura, California. The form came to me as a vision, stemming from a feeling of immense helplessness. My urge to hold and care for the land was strong. 

The power went out, and it felt like the beginning of something big. I sat alone in my apartment, wishing I had a powerbank for my phone and a battery powered radio. Once the power returned, we were glued to the screen. 

Check the perimeter, where am I? Check the line, look a the line, look at the wind, look at the line. 

We watched as two fires merged into one. I wanted to heal the land, care for it — I imagined holding it in my arms, submerging it in water — it would sizzle and steam. Throughout my practice, I work through retroactively healing, typically within the body. I am able to familiarize myself with a body part and now the landscape through touch, exploring each nook and cranny as my fingers do the listening. 

———————

The iron felt right — it’s of the earth, of the body, of the home, found in kitchens, bathrooms, machinery, and plumbing. It’s humble in its quiet existence — strong yet brittle. This piece is resilient, like the land it represents. 

Glass has a memory - its internal structure changes each time it’s heated, thus the structure is dependent on the history of the material. Because of its amorphous molecular configuration, glass reacts to heat differently than do other materials. Whereas metals heated to a specific temperature change from solid to liquid instantaneously, glass goes through a very gradual transformation— from a material that behaves like a solid to a material that behaves like a liquid, it is a unique characteristic. 

This body of work has led me to question permanence and the malleability of materials. Iron and glass are strong and stedfast, yielding only to extreme temperatures. The methods of creation mimicked that of the fire — an intense creep towards the outer edges. The work acts as an homage to the line drawings of which the community is painfully familiar.

Seen here as part of a group show at The Basic Premise, in Ojai, California.

photograph, cast bronze, 2017

Bronze cast at Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Snowmass, Colorado, under the tutelage of Norwood Viviano. 

"- we not only have a body that can create space but also that we are the body that is space" 

"- when the image of the body is created by the image of the space, one can easily forget that the human body is space, that it is the human body that produces space and that can practise place at the same time." 

- by Markus Hallensleben referring to Mock Rock by Ulrike Müller, 2004, in Importing Vallie Export. 

    These new photographs and sculptures are the exploration of the space around the body. The human form and the history of sculpture are deeply intertwined. Each photograph and corresponding sculpture, six in total, provide a formal study to find the lines and shapes that bodies possess. I have no solutions, but seek to visualize them by filling the body’s voids and cul-de-sacs with pools of bronze. The perimeter of the body is now adorned. In the photographs, the skin becomes a malleable medium, stressing the difference between organism and alloy. 

Cast bronze and digital prints.

Emily Baker’s work points to the abundance of form that structure and ghost us. Shapes fundamental to the bodies that constitute us appear before our eyes, unfamiliar and shimmering. It is intense and strange to find our human forms looking back at us as bronze echoes. The work questions the threshold of the relationship between the beautiful athletic body and the inexpressibility of the body in pain*. What are the ways of seeing the forms we inhabit? What are the ways of knowing the forms we inhabit but do not see? In this work, Emily Baker reaches toward elusive qualities essential to bodily life, but frozen out of art.

In our interviews, Emily jokingly refers to this as her “rehab” work. She is taking symbolic control over aspects of her body that she lost control of through injury. The work is “trying to understand pain — and the future of the current pain I have now.” As a young athlete, Emily Baker knew her body primarily in ways relevant to contests of strength and grace. Her youthful paradigm for experiencing and imaging the body was organized around what works in competitions where the rules are set and the goals are clear. She tells me that athleticism involves a kind of disconnection from the body — disregarding pain in order to compete. Years of training led her to being willfully ignorant of her body in pain. And now she is “painfully aware” of her body.  The young athlete who competes with her body meets the adult artist who discovers form. This involves a transformation from being in her body for competition to structuring her identity in a new way, asking about bodily experience that is not incorporated within an order of meaning. Baker’s work is a meditation on a way of knowing the body falling apart.  The “way of knowing” falls apart as the body falls apart. 

The gaze of Baker’s work is introspective. She examines her own forms —as athlete, as patient, and as artist. The forms can be seen, but they evoke an invisible internal life. The work plays on the in-between spaces of our maps, gazes and experiences — of how we perceive the body and why. 

-George Blake, Ph.D. - Lecturer in Black Studies, UCSB

 *See Elaine Scarry for a consideration of inexpressibility: Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford UP, 1985.

latex, steel, cast bronze, 2017

   Part of the show, Body Matters, curated by Holly Gore at the Art, Design, & Architecture Museum, at University of California, Santa Barbara. 

'Emily Baker is a former gymnast whose artworks capture the speed, risk, and physical exhilaration of the sport. They also elicit something of its ephemerality. Spinal Shift is an apparatus whose dynamic lattice-like structure and elegant ball-bearing joints rely on the elasticity of latex, an impermanent material that over time will dry and crack, much like the soft tissue within the body of an athlete as it ages.' - Holly Gore

Latex, steel, bronze. 

2016

Emily Baker's floor-to-ceiling paintings are traces of athleticism, documents of physical agility and strength. Having loaded her body with wet paint, she ascends a rope hung from the gallery ceiling, marking the wall as she goes. As anyone who has climbed a gym rope can attest, going up works the arms and core, and coming down requires a degree of control. In this and others of her performances, the artist -- who is a former gymnast -- captures the movements her muscles remember, and the love of flight her body knows. 

The paintings belong to a group of works that explores athleticism's transience, and the possibility of its re-homing in the practice of art. Sculptural elements include bronze casts of artificial joints, and lengths of latex tubing that are strung through steel supports. The bronzes highlight the vulnerability of our skeletons to the grind of repetition, while the tubing recalls the elasticity of connective tissue and --as latex is known to degrade with age-- the loss thereof over time. In placing the active body along a temporal curve, these works offer a counterpoint to the emphasis on peak fitness that pervades competitive sports.

- Holly Gore, PhD Candidate, History of Art, UC Santa Barbara

Photographs by Troy David, Mohit Hingorani & Tony Mastres

2016

When a ligament is torn, an audible popping noise is heard. This body of work is a representation of a phrase spoken by athletes when describing an injury. This indicates the severity. These sculptures extract this visceral feeling and examine the longterm physical effects when pushing the body too far.

Latex, steel, bronze, paper prints