CV
Email - joanne_baker@live.co.ukArtist Info
1987 Born in Birmingham, West Midlands, UK
2003 - 2005 The sixth form college Solihull
2005 - 2006 Coventry University, Foundation Diploma Art & Design
2006 - 2009 Coventry University, First Class BA(Hons) in Fine Art
Group Exhibitions
2009 Free Range, The Old Truman Brewery, Bricklane, London. 2nd July - 6th July
2009 Degree show, Coventry University. 29th May - 5th June
2009 Half year show, Lanchester Gallery. Coventry 5th - 12th February
2008 I.D. Chartered Architects, 27 spon street. Coventry 11th December
2008 Six of one, Rugby museum & art gallery. Rugby 1st April
2008 Beer & brushes - pints & paint, Far Gosford street. Coventry 26th March
2008 New Horizons RBSA, RBSA gallery. Birmingham 13th March
Awards
2009 Karen Trusselle Prize for Fine Art (Shortlisted), Coventry University school of Art & Design
2008 Jane Sutton Memorial Award, Coventry University school of Art & Design
Artist Statement For 2009 Installation
“…an uncanny effect often arises when the boundary between fantasy and reality is blurred, when we are faced with the reality of something that we have until now considered imaginary, when a symbol takes on the full function and significance of what it symbolizes, and so forth.” -Sigmund Freud
My work is an attempt to elicit curiosity in the viewer through subtle but rousing depictions of the Uncanny, and other surrealist influences.
The drawings are all drawn from the imagination, and employ open-ended narratives and the surrealist propensity to evade logical associations to evoke a sensation of the extraordinary.
I have chosen to display these pictures without frames, as this allows the images to interact; creating an evolving, disjointed narrative as pieces are added and taken away from the wider collection of images.
The sculptures are created to further illustrate the sense of anxiety experienced when confronted by the uncanny; when a familiar object or surrounding becomes unfamiliar to us – in this case gigantic - though the manipulations and shifts in our perception of what is commonplace.
The tea-cups stuffed with hair are reminiscent of Meret Oppenheim’s Fur Breakfast 1936. My work develops a wider context through its pretence to the surrealists. However, the sheer number of cups is to demonstrate what Freud described as an uncanny ‘compulsion to repeat’.
In Freudian psychoanalysis hair can represent anxiety. The loss of, or pulling of, hair from the head is inextricably linked with disorders such as trichotillomania. Even without delving into the psychoanalytical concepts, the image of hair in a cup feels strange and unnerving.
The decision to display this collection of work in a disjointed, homely way was taken in order to juxtapose the fantastic with a familiar setting, and lend credence to Freud’s description of the uncanny.
Henceforth it seems right to analyze the ways in which the subject is affected, its ways of receiving and experiencing feelings, its way of judging works. This is how aesthetics, the analysis of the addressee's feelings, comes to supplant poetics and rhetoric ... No longer "How does one make a work of art?" but "What is it to experience an affect proper to art?" -J.F Lyotard