Emma Baker
1991, Southhampton, UK
Emma Baker has worked with glass for over ten years, initially encountering the material whilst studying Applied Arts at Bournemouth University, she received her BA (hons) from Sunderland University in 2014.
Her passion for learning and understanding the material has driven her to work with an abundance of glassmakers in a variety of locations. In 2019 she became one of two Associate Artists at North Lands Creative, a two-year programme supporting & developing the practice of glass artists. She spent 2020 living and working in Bergen, Norway, keeping the furnace alight at S12 Galleri og Verksted, an incredible experience that Baker describes as a pivotal point in her life and career. In the summer of 2022, the United Nations’ year of glass, she was invited by the National Glas Museum in Leerdam, Holland, for an international glass exchange to create work that is now held in their public collection.
She has been awarded residencies at Berlin Glas, The Glass Factory, S12 Bergen and North Lands Creative; alongside this her work has been shown across the UK & Europe, most recently at the Crafts Council’s Collect 2023, London. She has received scholarship funding to the USA and has worked on international cross-cultural projects supported by British Council Scotland and Creative Europe. She has also been a teaching assistant at Corning Museum of Glass, Bild-Werk Frauenau and North Lands Creative.
Based on a farm in Somerset, Baker is hugely inspired by the materiality of glass and the ideology behind the hand of the maker. With a strong emphasis on process, she works with themes of narrative and sentiment to conceive and create her artworks.
In the artist's own words;
"Specialising in blown glass, my practice has always explored a curiosity around memories and the events we experience throughout life. How can a memory fill us with feelings of euphoria & excitement at the same time as loneliness & sadness? The emotions we experience surely have a weighting on the creation of our memories.
Visually these works are not only connected to a distinctive personal memory but are also underpinned by a fascination of antonymous pairings, the juxtaposition of two qualities together: Smooth & crumpled, calm & chaos, achievement & failure.
The Torsion series is a technical exploration born from my time as a teaching assistant on James Maskrey’s master class at Bild-Werk Frauenau in Germany in May 2016. Whilst developing my technical abilities and skill, I found that the walls of a blown glass vessel would ripple and buckle when subjected to an imbalance of either heat or thicknesses. The works created now, several years on, are the culmination of the technical journey to handcraft a glass cylinder without the use of moulds or formers, alongside demonstrating understanding and control of the material to encourage the specific folding of the vessel wall."
Artist portrait by Megan Gallacher.
Her passion for learning and understanding the material has driven her to work with an abundance of glassmakers in a variety of locations. In 2019 she became one of two Associate Artists at North Lands Creative, a two-year programme supporting & developing the practice of glass artists. She spent 2020 living and working in Bergen, Norway, keeping the furnace alight at S12 Galleri og Verksted, an incredible experience that Baker describes as a pivotal point in her life and career. In the summer of 2022, the United Nations’ year of glass, she was invited by the National Glas Museum in Leerdam, Holland, for an international glass exchange to create work that is now held in their public collection.
She has been awarded residencies at Berlin Glas, The Glass Factory, S12 Bergen and North Lands Creative; alongside this her work has been shown across the UK & Europe, most recently at the Crafts Council’s Collect 2023, London. She has received scholarship funding to the USA and has worked on international cross-cultural projects supported by British Council Scotland and Creative Europe. She has also been a teaching assistant at Corning Museum of Glass, Bild-Werk Frauenau and North Lands Creative.
Based on a farm in Somerset, Baker is hugely inspired by the materiality of glass and the ideology behind the hand of the maker. With a strong emphasis on process, she works with themes of narrative and sentiment to conceive and create her artworks.
In the artist's own words;
"Specialising in blown glass, my practice has always explored a curiosity around memories and the events we experience throughout life. How can a memory fill us with feelings of euphoria & excitement at the same time as loneliness & sadness? The emotions we experience surely have a weighting on the creation of our memories.
Visually these works are not only connected to a distinctive personal memory but are also underpinned by a fascination of antonymous pairings, the juxtaposition of two qualities together: Smooth & crumpled, calm & chaos, achievement & failure.
The Torsion series is a technical exploration born from my time as a teaching assistant on James Maskrey’s master class at Bild-Werk Frauenau in Germany in May 2016. Whilst developing my technical abilities and skill, I found that the walls of a blown glass vessel would ripple and buckle when subjected to an imbalance of either heat or thicknesses. The works created now, several years on, are the culmination of the technical journey to handcraft a glass cylinder without the use of moulds or formers, alongside demonstrating understanding and control of the material to encourage the specific folding of the vessel wall."
Artist portrait by Megan Gallacher.
Artworks by the artist
