Based in Boorloo/Perth, Western Australia, Sharon Baker is a multi-disciplinary artist who explores the themes of lost memories, histories, and narratives; seeking how souvenirs of the past can be reimagined and reconstructed through a contemporary art lens.
ARTIST STATEMENT
A found box of negatives belonging to my late father, has been a catalyst for my on-going exploration into ideas of fragmented narratives caused from untold histories.
From investigation and translation of this photographic archive, I hope to give the images a possible dialogue that my father neglected to do through storytelling. My practice-led research utilises the photographic printmaking processes of solvent transfer and photo etching, together with drawing and installation methodologies to create new works in response to source archive. I seek ways to narrate the collective or storylines concept through fabric, transfer, and trace, as a way to exhaust the image, occupy space as existence and reflect the fallibility of memories. I explore the themes of lost memories, histories, and narratives; investigating them further in creative ways to query this intergenerational mystery.
I aim to: reproduce, recapture, repeat and retell this archive, bringing the past into the present through material experimentation and installation. Incorporating items like a postcard as ‘images of spatial time’ to validate these lost moments into a physical existence. Some key ideas I want to address is undisclosed histories, the sensitivity of memory and the fidelity in reproduction that relate in shaping our identity.