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Jul 2006 - Linda Baker - LINDA BAKER PRESS RELEASE |
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LINDA BAKER PRESS RELEASE Linda Baker is a textile artist who has recently completed a BA. Honours degree in Applied Arts at Hertfordshire University. She is setting up a small business from her studio in North London and hopes to gain commissions and exhibitions for her work. Linda’s work combines stitch, lace fragments and stones to create ethereal sculptural forms. Initially inspired by plants and algae clinging to rocks by the seashore she became fascinated by how life could grow in such seemingly hostile environments. She began to make connections between these living forms in the natural world and the fragility and tenacity of human existence and how people can overcome great difficulties and survive extreme circumstances. Her work expresses these ideas by using stones with the stitched pieces emerging or attached to them. Tension is created between the hard unyielding stone and the soft pliable textile forms. Linda’s work explores the contrasts between fragility and strength, softness and hardness and lightness and weight. The seemingly fragile textile pieces are constructed from a web of invisible monofilament thread which is free machine embroidered onto soluble fabric and which gives the work an inner strength. Caught by further stitching within the work are silk fibres, yarns, lace fragments and screen printed lace and text. The pieces either reach up from heavy stones to the ceiling or cling and hang down from above in 3D forms. Some heavy stones are held in suspension by the stitched work and are also weighted down by them. Other stones are enveloped or protected by the stitching. Delicate shadows are cast onto surrounding areas from the fragile stitched forms which hover in space.
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