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Claire Baily

Born in Worcester, the artist Claire Baily now lives and works in London. Her work not only functions at the intersection of art and design, but also stands somewhere between sculpture and painting. Baily uses material combinations that combine natural and geometrical shapes, thus introducing the relationship between organic and synthetic. Further, through engaging in sculptural practice, she embraces both historical and technological making processes. Often made of carefully crafted components, her objects are driven by time, form, material, and method.

By the means of abstract language, Claire Baily purposefully uses only a certain set of materials or visual motifs in a singular piece of work. These ‘limitations’ became the sort of coded framework or index in which she operates.

Often inspired by architecture and design, Baily’s sculptural forms hint at both, the familiar and the unidentifiable from the world around us. Using sculpture, form, and material gesture as a way to process information, the artist asks questions about the past, present, and future.

Claire Baily’s expositions appear with a sense of arrested motion, just as time went still. And it seems as if she tries to capture an elaborate and too vast for the understanding process. For example, in her work Rest now my melancholic heart, human hearts emerge from a clay-like surface. The organs, vitally important for a human, appear within cage-like structures that struggle to contain them. Were those carefully laid down hearts buried some time ago? Are they being held down?

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