About Britany Baker

Britany attended Xavier University in Cincinnati on full scholarship and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in drawing and painting in 1991. Since then she has worked extensively in scenic design/painting for theater and television, mural painting, illustration and fine art. She has been a designer and creative director for multiple media outlets and ad agencies over the past 25 years. Britany is also currently the creative director for Wingspan Integrating Marketing and the studio manager for Art Sanctuary, a nonprofit arts group with studios in Louisville’s Germantown neighborhood.

Artist statement

In my art practice I explore themes related to the body and to living forms. I’m interested in how things grow: How bone and tissue make room for one another, how wet slippery forms swell and behave in gravity, how root systems branch mathematically. I’m interested in the difference between the look and behavior of space-making soft tissue vs. dry, structured, path-making hard tissue and how sturdy, yet delicate, life is.

I’m also exploring how capturing movement on a 2D surface can be used to record time. Processes initiated in nature and governed by mathematics reveal how nature expands and grows. I want to flatten these processes into images that capture that initial energy and that expansion. I’m interested in how life finds its way and I’m hoping to stay true to that goal by using elements we find in life: water and carbon. My work relies heavily on automatic drawing and I think of the making of artwork as a conversation I am having with my materials. I work to become centered before initiating these conversations and then facilitate the materials to reveal what is in their nature. The water is acting as an agent in these pieces, but is, in the end, completely absent, revealing to us its path over time - and not just in its application, but also in its evaporation. When a living things dies and life recedes, the last bit left is the structure or skeleton. In this same way, I hope to reveal the structure of the motion of water once the water is gone.