essays
essays
Claire’s practice-based, emotion-led research is concerned with place/non-place, memory, displacement and the lost. She has a deep interest in the everyday life of the other. Other foci include the exploration of transcultural parallels and differences, and her practice contemporises the traditional influences of historical textile craft to continue its legacy, particularly amongst young audiences and diasporas. Her research-responsive artworks explore texture, scale and negative space, her methods and materials are definitively informed by her concepts developing new connections between past and present.
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Education
BA (1st Class Hons) Textiles & Surface Design. The Northern School of Art
[1999-2005]
MFA. Manchester Metropolitan University
[2014-18]
(MONOGRAPH) EMBROIDERY AS LANGUAGE.
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Ph.D. Northumbria University [2019-2024]:
MAKING RELATIONSHIPS: THE VALUE OF DIALOGICAL PRACTICE WITH A LOST COMMUNITY IN THE CHORNOBYL EXCLUSION ZONE.
Research Focus:
Relationships [Connectedness and Communication].
Key Themes: Value. Connection. Loss. Love. Place. Home. Remembrance. Relics.
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Long term goal:
Baker aims to build an archive of mid-century embroideries from the Chornobyl exclusion zone. She has been collecting and recording examples since 2015 to help save the textile legacy of those evacuated in 1986 and especially of those Babushkas who returned.
It is important to Claire to be able to engage in new research and partnerships in order to collate, catalogue, preserve and share these lost embroideries through the building and launching of an interactive design website, a living archive, freely accessible worldwide. This huge project has become even more important and is highly time critical due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine since the beginning of 2022, since when there has been a systematic annihilation of Ukraine’s material culture.