LILY ALICE BAKER

Lily Baker’s work draws on memory to explore her own identity within a world dominated by the masculine. Based in South East London and a recent Goldsmiths graduate, Baker uses painting to conjure sometimes lucid, sometimes distorted scenes from memory. This form of genre painting seeks to penetrate the existing ‘boys-only club' that clouds large-scale gestural painting, Baker’s spectral approach to understanding the human form and its relationships to certain environments, indulging in the romanticism of euphoric feeling whilst exposing the seediness of what goes on in the shadows. Heightened in our attempts to relearn “normal life” post-pandemic.The visceral oil paintings act as a physical rejection of the discourse of the hermetically sealed female body. Her work questions machoism examining and exaggerating sexual and gender tensions in the ritualism of daily life scenes, currently focusing on her own relationship to the pub, alcohol and the gendered space in which these notions create. The large canvases of many of Baker’s pieces demand attention and suggest a confidence that the delicacy of the brush strokes betray. The viewer is drawn in to the finer details to find discrete scenes and pieces of narrative. Baker’s work is a product of an amalgamation of movement, using the body’s language to ask questions of her own identity in the world.