artists

FRANCIS BAKER
Resume

Francis Baker encourages sequoia, peace lily and china doll roots to grow into cast containers and then guides them to take on the shape of that container. The work begins as living sculpture and is then presented as photography. Exploring themes of confinement, abandonment, influence, and isolation, the plants and their roots become strangely anthropomorphic. The pieces fluctuate between the abstract and figurative.

Instead of obvious references to the environment, Baker prefers to talk about his photos in psychological and sociological terms. "To facilitate personal sovereignty and the responsibility that accompanies this, when fundamental thought structures confine growth, we must break through their artificial barriers," explains Baker.

Baker’s elaborate root sculptures and photographs are metaphors for human relationships exploring the tension between smothering love and withering neglect. The photographs make one contemplate the turning point of when a guiding and enabling hand becomes manipulative. Boundaries guide us, yet, eventually can become constraining. After years of direction, some roots have turned from brilliant lively green to the parched brown death of abandonment.

Francis Baker studied physics at the University of Wisconsin. He has exhibited his work nationally. Baker lives and makes his art in San Francisco.

"Francis Baker trains plant roots into various molds, producing bizarre figures that he photographs. From the top of a Barbie-like head, a tree sprouts." - Seattle Post Intelligencer

"The central metaphor of the Everyday Garden series is the tension between smothering love and withering neglect...Baker’s idiosyncratic choice of media balancing old and new, stable and precarious echoes the tension in his works between love and neglect, life and death, closing in and breaking free."

—Artweek