Context

My earliest memories are of drawing, constantly drawing at our beach hut, an old solid tattered railway carriage at St Helen’s Duver. I played on the cliffs and beaches and in the water around Forelands making “radios” from washed up objects from countries a long way off. Sliding down Black rock, climbing Whitecliff and cockling at the Duver made me understand a lot about how the physical and living world worked. As kids we would try and dislodge large lumps of cliffs with increasing guile and technology as we aged. Culminating in a crude and thankfully ineffective pipe bomb. I dug lug and rag for the grockle anglers. I plunged from the lifeboat pier.

I trained as a figurative sculptor at Wimbledon School of Art and then at St Martins where we bashed the life out of hot metal to try and make it see sense. I now work in and with any medium and in any art form that seems to make artistic sense.

But it is my early immersion in the stuff of the Earth which has crept back into my mature artwork. I have recently drawn parallels between the physical disorder of the Island landscapes and the human challenges we face at home by reconfiguring interior materials.

Jan 2025

Practice

Making helps me process our life cycle; Genesis to decay and whatever ceasing to be means.

My work comes partly from soaking in what I come across on my walks. They have a biology, a physics and the geometry that comes with them. They are equally rooted in being part of and observing the wide, frail and magnificent landscape of human nature.
I work directly with a wide range of materials chosen as a challenge and in the hope the outcome crystallises my thinking.

My production process doesn’t involve any sort of naturalistic drawing for design or research. I sometimes take photographs and make short videos but discard many after the event is fixed. Sometimes I respond to where I am through change of state drawings where circles become square. These also serve as visual cleansing exercises

I am guided by learning about a wide range of ideas from science, humanities and the wider arts. I am a fox not a hedgehog thinker.

I like where the outcome has both a sinister and wonder element. I don’t always aim to produce playful work but it seems to emerge. I am governed by mental Venn diagrams where the crossover is something that approaches answering a question I didn’t always know existed

I do not aim to preach or educate but I’d hope that something of the works’ intent is squeezed out for the viewer to take in and reflect on their themes

Steve Baxter

November 2024