Caroline Baker
Caroline Baker grew up in Largo, MD, and remembers picking up a paint brush at the age of three, and thinking “this is what I want to do when I grow up.” She studied art at Radford in VA, then moved to Wise County, VA, where studied various pursuits, including art curriculum, science, history, the technical aspects of surface design and using stretched canvas as fiber art. Upon returning to the D.C., Metro area, she opened the beachKraft art gallery and studio in Olney, MD where she teaches artists ages 5-adult and exhibits local and nationally recognized visual artists.
She has painted in all mediums, but prefers mixed media, using found objects with paint. To quote Caroline, “If it’s a traditional landscape or an abstract neo-contemporary piece, my artwork always comes back to a sense of place.” But ‘place’ to her includes location, time, culture, the digital realm and art history.
Artist Statement
My work is an exploration of the relationship between the physical, entropic object and the non-physical, ephemeral mirror non-object. The objects involved may be anything in the natural or human made sphere, not excluding the human being as both repository and generator of non-objectified data. As humanity becomes more enmeshed with digital infrastructure we continually create a trail of data points that may describe individuals, groups and other entities such as corporations and government entities.
My current body of work often takes the form of assemblage using everyday items that could be described as “kipple” - objects without use that my seem to reproduce as a form of environmental-human entropy, objects that briefly had a use in the ordered environment that have become the very symbol of disorder. My process often involves several stages of construction/deconstruction/construction as a metaphor for our human existence as both physical and mental/spiritual and as a collection of connected information or data.
Themes often include any repository for coded information such as receipts, shipping vehicles, signage or manuals. Visually this content appears in numerical or text formats juxtaposed with natural or organic imagery and objects where they may be interpreted within their context as art objects.
Abstractions
