Attraction, repulsion, horror and hilarity – Lou Baker’s work provokes a range of conflicting responses. Balanced between form and formlessness, it’s shapeshifting and flexible, alluring, yet somehow, also, uncanny.

Stereotypically, knitting and stitch are expected to be decorative, functional, benign, perfect and finished; they normally have associations with comfort, the body and garments. Baker’s work subverts these expectations. She creates unsettling sculptures and immersive installations which address difficult issues. It’s intentionally sloppy craft, gestural, unfinished, and unravelling, often made and installed in public spaces. Its skin-like, soft impermanence and associated femininities remind us of our mortality.

Through her work, Baker explores the ambiguous spaces between a number of binaries – self/other, public/private, comfort/discomfort, embodiment/disembodiment, absence/presence and, ultimately, life and death. Boundaries provide certainty; considering them as thresholds acknowledges them as flexible which leads to disquiet.

This darker side of her sculptural practice, however, is balanced by a brighter side of social engagement and collaboration. By inviting others to become participants, performers and cocreators, she models strategies for improving wellbeing, making connections and building communities. It’s as if she knits together materiality, process, meaning and critical thought with people and places. Her work creates an uneasy tension in aesthetics, evoking a bodily presence with notions of absence and the abject. It’s a provocation to thought, conversation and action.

It’s a question of balance.

Lou lives in Bristol, UK. In 2015, she graduated with First Class Honours in BA Drawing and Applied Arts at UWE. She was awarded an Embroiderers’ Guild Scholarship in her final year. In 2021 she received a Distinction in her MA in Fine Art at Bath Spa University. In 2022 she was selected for New Contemporaries and Emerge, the Bath Spa Uni Graduate residency scheme. In 2023, she was selected for Luke Jerram’s Dreamtime Fellowship, a year’s residency Spike Island. She was part of the New Platform Art professional development programme 2024-5 and in 2025 she was accepted as a member of the Royal Society of Sculptors.

She’s involved in two art collectives, seam collective and Social Scaffolding Art Collective, both of which received Arts Council project funding for two separate touring exhibitions in 2023-24, A Visible THREAD and Social Scaffolding. Lou was also part of seam collective’s more recent Arts Council-funded project, Warped and Wasted, in 2025. Lou sometimes collaborates with Oly Bliss, and, in 2024, as Baker & Bliss, they facilitated Glowing and Growing, a largescale glow-in-the-dark immersive and interactive installation as part of two Light Night events.

Other select exhibitions and projects:

2024 Vessel: an art trail in remote rural churches, with Art & Christianity and Friends of Friendless Churches, 8 Aug – 31 Oct.

2020 Wishing trees, 4 public spaces, Bristol, 24 Mar – 1 Nov.

2019 B-Wing, Shepton Mallet Prison, Somerset, an Arts Council-funded project with Somerset Art Works, 21 Sept – 6 Oct.