EMILY BAINES
From a young age I have been curious about my own mental health.
Using my experience of meditation practices, I developed a visual method to try to understand my own psyche. I view my emotions and thoughts in a constructed landscape in my brain, I extract the idea of forms from these visualisation and realise it in the physical world.
This is a mostly cathartic process, a brightly coloured upholstered toilet seat chair is a literal representation of concerns I had over the access to toilets!
The realised forms are quotations from my internal narrative. I create a story with each step in my making process; the editing of images, the photocopying and layering of different forms of source materials on top of each other. There are structures to walk in, thermochromic elements and light within objects. The relationship with the space around the work grounds the audience and exaggerates the physicality of my sculptures.
My work touches on my relationship with the world around me and the implicit rules that anchor me in society. The natural and man-made enviroments and the boundary between the two, is a constant discovery. I often incorporate elements I have seen on walks in natural enviroments, patterns and situations, I photograph and then warp these moments, to imitate the muted feeling the man-made world impresses on me.
I over-edit, over-process and subvert.
So, a memory of watching the northern lights in a hot tub, drunk on prosecco, a situation that confuses the boundary between the natural and man-made environments, is translated into blurred forms, light spots and squiggling lines…
INSTAGRAM @BASICALLYBAINES