I wish to acknowledge the traditional custodians of this land, the Whadjuk Noongar people.
I pay respects to the elders, past and present, recognising their connection to land, water and community where we live, learn and work. Always was, always will be.
Sharon Baker is a Western Australian artist, photographer and designer. She is an early-career, multi-disciplinary artist who explores the themes of lost memories, histories, and narratives; seeking how relics can be reimagined and deciphered and how we in return, archive them. Using material and process to ride the tension, both alternating or simultaneously, between traditional artmaking and digital methodologies.
ARTIST STATEMENT - Current Work
Field Notes is an exploration into a found photograph featuring a group of people within a landscape and absent of context or caption. Unsure of what this collective is looking for, their heads are cast downward – foraging? – searching?
Drawing on Paul Klee’s assertion that art should reveal rather than replicate – that observation is not passive but interpretive (Creative Confession, 1920), I approach the image as an unstable archive – of both artifact and enigma, where meaning is provisional and layered.
By referencing the past tense of the archive and its future through digital conversion, I engage in a process of visual excavation and study. Using layering and note-taking to survey and record my observations as journal pages, I reflect on the fallibility of reproduction and interpretation an archival object invites. Through the repetitive evaluation, the work acknowledges the limits of knowing, while embracing the potential of re-making, and re-searching.