Lily Alice Baker was born in Newcastle, raised in Kent, and is based currently 

in London. She completed her Foundation Diploma in Fine Art at Sussex

Coast College in Hastings and her B.A. in Fine Art at Goldsmiths University in

London.

In the area of Lily Alice Baker’s university, the pub serves as a melting pot

where disparate social groups, fueled by diminished inhibitions and a shared

desire to let off steam, come together in bacchanalias scenes where the

possibility of violence lurks beneath the release of intoxication. Traditionally

composed of locals watching football matches, the pub’s clientele evolved in

recent years to include art students who fought for a seat at the bar. Watching

people dance, flirt, and fight in the kinetically paced barroom, Baker noticed

cultural markers of identity begin to dissolve into each other: Football shirts

found company next to campy high-heeled boots, and stoics staring at TV

 

Screens shared space with revelers jumping into each other’s arms. “Every-

thing’s a hyperbole,” Baker says, “People blur into one organism, and every-

one’s character is heightened.”

 

Drawing on both Abstract Expressionism and figurative painting, Lily’s work

explores her own identity in a world catered to masculinity. Naturally inclined

to push herself outside her boundaries, Baker navigates spaces that are not

traditionally a safe haven for female and queer people and, with a keen eye

for body language, renders the revealing ways in which gender is performed.

Figures in the midst of vulnerability or machismo are recalled by their most

 

telling characteristic— a slumped shoulder, a raised brow— and then blend-

ed together with bold painterly gestures that defy the hermetically sealed

 

notion of the female body. The glowing anthropomorphic figures that emerge

from Baker’s seedy dreamscapes hint at the possibility of a public arena

where fluid notions of gender might thrive. “We learn who we are by blending

into others,” Baker says. “It requires bouncing between people who view the

world differently.”