Page 30 - Art Almanac (February 2020)

Kate Baker

Sublimate

Vanessa Low

It’s a scorcher of a day when I visit Kate Baker at her studio in Sydney; light illuminates her
sizeable space and I can see the breadth of her practice all around: sketches, large machinery,
a shelf filled with casts of body parts, a section of leaning silkscreens, a computer and two large
tables down the middle. ‘Be careful, that’s really sharp’, she warns as I pass by a new delivery of
glass sheets.

Capturing the intangible has been a running theme throughout Baker’s work and she ruminates
on the complexities of lived experiences as a kind of spirituality. ‘We live as if we live forever but
we really don’t and when we’re gone, we really are gone. And you can hypothesise about what
happens after death but it’s exactly that, it’s a hypothesis,’ Kate articulates. It’s clear that these
beliefs are deeply rooted in how she sees the world, not just in her art. Baker cites her mother’s
passing when she was young as a catalyst for this contemplation; her works evoke fleeting
suggestions of memories and intimacy.

Baker began her art practice with photography, printmaking and sculpture but is now best known
for her mastery of glass; her work Within Matter #2 (2020) was just recently exhibited in ‘New
Glass Now’ at the Corning Museum of Glass in New York. Baker’s practice with glass is not the
fragile, decorative kind that we think of in our daily lives, the kind that is valued for its clarity. Her
works feature foggy whisps of people and scrawling textures, layers of iridescent forms that escape
definition.

The elusive and reflective nature of glass speaks to Baker’s conceptual focus well; she explores
the temporal nature of mortality, of memories and history co-existing with our physical forms.
The title of her show ‘Sublimate’ captures this essence accurately; the scientific word refers to the
transformation of a substance directly from a solid to gas, bypassing the liquid form. This occurs
in volcanoes during eruption and, more commonly, with dry ice.

‘Sublimate’ features three bodies of work, one being of the same title as the exhibition. For this,
Baker worked with a photo she took of her son. Her practice often begins with photography,
however she explains ‘I don’t really see myself as a photographer... I do a lot of work on the images
in post. Printing, screen printing and etching so the image is formed purely in the texture of
the glass.’ Baker also works with mirror, stainless steel and aluminium – ‘it’s a lot of different
materials coming together to tell a story.’ She shows me the aforementioned work in progress:
the soft and hazy shapes look ephemeral, like they could easily float away from the glass and
disappear into thin air.

The most expansive work in the show is the large hanging installation Pulse (2019), consisting
of 100 curved glass forms suspended from the ceiling through which a projection of a woman is
visible. ‘There’s more to glass than being a flat panel,’ expresses Baker, ‘when you start projecting
on glass, the easiest thing you can do is drown it out. The glass ceases to have meaning and it’s
just a screen for your video work. Whereas I really want to push the video back and get that nuance
between how the glass is interrelating with the moving image and light.’

Baker realised that the emotional range she wanted in the video could not be captured by a model,
so she looked to one of her students, the Australian actor Leeanna Walsman. With the assistance

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