Claire A Baker United Kingdom

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I am a Visual Artist, Researcher and Maker specialising in textiles, who has recently completed an AHRC-funded practice-based doctorate at Northumbria University. I exhibit regularly both individually and as part of a collaborative partnership and art collectives. My research is communicated through multi-disciplinary artworks, underpinned by international presentations and exhibitions.

My practice is concerned with love, loss, legacy, place, memory, trace, abandonment, dispersal, connections, and the everyday of the other.

Archival work reflects a focus on the Babushkas (self-settlers) of Chernobyl and their embroideries as an on-going initiative and an experiential poignant investigation that has developed over the past nine years. Through my creative textile practice and by using the process of stitch as a communicative device through one-to-one stitching sessions with the Babushkas - those who returned to live in the exclusion zone of Chernobyl, against all odds, who are now a tiny, dispersed and ageing community, I have strived to enable cross-cultural encounters and translations, across local-global divides. At the heart of my research is my relationships with the Babushkas and their artefactual heritage which includes work which we make together, and that I continue apart, from historical, personal examples and those abandoned numbering thousands of disintegrating embroideries, as soon, all will be lost forever.

My contemporary making is inspired by the traditional and historical influences of textile craft. Research-responsive artworks explore texture, scale and negative space, my methodology being definitively informed by my concepts. One intention is to ensure that historic and regional embroidery examples are not forever lost due to the lack of future generations and the destruction of a community and its culture, by making the invisible visible to continue a legacy.

I aim to: • Elevate the ordinary • Give value to that seen as without • Use artworks as narrative

Currently, I am developing my work in terms of scale, industrial processes and concept, making new connections between the past and the future.