Who is Bridget Baker and what is behind her fascination with the working classes’ manual labour expression in her art?

Born 1971 in East London, Bridget Baker was educated at the universities of Stellenbosch and Cape Town. She has worked mostly within the realm of installation, incorporating photography, video, some craft forms, and documenting her public interventions.

This award-winning and internationally renowned artist’s episodic artworks speak about direct childhood experiences and the general contemporary existence through hyper-realistically reconstructed performance art pieces. Initial concerns regarding the elitism connected to the fine art world led to Baker using household materials and techniques such as weaving, knitting and sewing (all associated with domesticity) to flout ‘high art’ conventions.

Her performance art engaged a broader audience in public spaces, while more recent work reflects her cinematographic expertise in photo stills that display dramatic gesture and strong lighting effects. Her background as a movie stylist and her interest in 1950s movie genres clearly inform her hyper – realistic photographic narratives.

Early Performance art

Initially Baker created work that obsessively referenced autobiographical memories using devices such as smell, for instance Vicks Vapor Rub in So it Goes (1996). She consciously creates work about her past and childhood, using performance art to transcend the boundaries of meaning and myth, reality and fiction.

Baker used performance for the first time in 2001, sitting in a window of a dry cleaner’s store in Stellenbosch, laboriously die-cutting locally sourced ATM slips into the shape of acorn leaves, simultaneously involving passers-by in the process. This marked the beginning of the Official BB Project, which involved interventions in public spaces to highlight how bureaucracy attains more credibility through personal actions.

Baker says she wanted to create a vehicle through which the mundane could be made more meaningful, as illustrated in the Official BB Mittens Project (2003), which saw unsuspecting visitors receiving a warm hand-wax treatment through a hole in the wall.

Only You Can©

The autobiographical thread present in her work, represented through art products such as embroidered facsimiles of academic and other certificates from her school years, gradually made way for the process wherein she confers authority on her chosen subject using her trademark phrases, “Bridget Says” and “Only You Can”.

These phrases act as tools of authentication for the mundane acts Baker elevates to art in her pieces. Documenting these elaborately staged and photographed pieces simultaneously creates new realities while eroding existing preconceptions.

Her fascination with the working classes’ manual labour finds expression in her art, which reveal a labour-intensiveness bordering on obsession, present from her earliest intricately embroidered pieces to her later, large-scale, episodic production pieces shot on location across the globe.

Conclusion: Baker has no formal studio space and creates her art and sources her collaborators where required, often on-site, stating that ideas manifest differently in alternative environments.

Visit www.bridgetbaker.co.za to view a wider selection of her works.