CINDY BAKER

Artist statement

As an interdisciplinary performance artist with a background in object-making, my work explores human relationships to “things” – both my relationship to things as object-maker and artist interacting with the objects of my creation and the audience’s relationship to those things, emotional and physical/tactile.

My work relies heavily on an ability to integrate theories of the “other” with a strong popular culture vocabulary. Key methods I employ include intervention and collaboration, allowing me to work simultaneously from without and within the cultures/subcultures that form my communities. Building this cross-disciplinary framework into a strong studio practice facilitates destabilizing the centre that I am intervening into, making room for the other.

My work is informed by a commitment to ethical community engagement and critical social inquiry. The theoretical background for my research originates in queer theory, fat studies, disability theory, critical race theory, feminist theory, and art theory, and allows my research-based practice to move fluently between the arts, humanities, and social sciences. I consider context to be my primary medium, and employ diverse materials and techniques from the low-craft (such as latch-hooking) to digital fabrication and performance, emphasizing the theoretical, conceptual and ephemeral aspects of my work over discipline.

Common subjects of my art include the performance of persona and gender roles. In my work I also address the gallery and the roles people play within it; the performance of expected viewership behaviour and the pushing of those rigid boundaries. Coming from the ‘outsider’ position of a queer woman with a fat body, I make work that challenges normative standards of the body, beauty ideals, gender and sexuality. Coming from the ‘insider’ position of an artist who’s worked for 20 years within the gallery system, my work addresses the performative/presentation context and the roles people play within it, including the performance of expected viewership behaviour. In my thesis work I employ a synthesis of both of these impulses. I also recognize my position as a white cisgender woman with relative class and educational privilege, and want to use that privilege to make space for those who do not. Curatorial and collaborative projects are thus essential facets of my creative practice.

Proposing methodological approaches that provoke risk, transgression, distance, and intimacy via tactics designed to de-emphasize the artist’s body, I hope to enable a shift in focus from my body to others’ bodies, the othered body, and embodiment as a concept. So doing, the work can effectively build empathetic relationships within the gallery while simultaneously creating space for a careful examination of audience response to the work.