Lily Alice Baker (b.1998) was born in Newcastle, raised in Kent, and is based currently in London. She completed her Foundation Diploma in Fine Art at Sussex Coast College in Hastings and her B.A. in Fine Art at Goldsmiths University in London.

In the area of Lily Alice Baker’s university, the pub serves as a melting pot where disparate social groups, fueled by diminished inhibitions and a shared desire to let off steam, come together in bacchanalias scenes where the possibility of violence lurks beneath the release of intoxication. Traditionally composed of locals watching football matches, the pub’s clientele evolved in recent years to include art students who fought for a seat at the bar. Watching people dance, flirt, and fight in the kinetically paced barroom, Baker noticed cultural markers of identity begin to dissolve into each other: Football shirts found company next to campy high-heeled boots, and stoics staring at TV Screens shared space with revelers jumping into each other’s arms. “Everything’s a hyperbole,” Baker says, “People blur into one organism, and everyone’s character is heightened.”

Drawing on both Abstract Expressionism and figurative painting, Baker’s work explores her own identity in a world catered to masculinity. Naturally inclined to push herself outside her boundaries, Baker navigates spaces that are not traditionally a safe haven for female and queer people and, with a keen eye for body language, renders the revealing ways in which gender is performed. Figures in the midst of vulnerability or machismo are recalled by their most telling characteristic— a slumped shoulder, a raised brow— and then blended together with bold painterly gestures that defy the hermetically sealed notion of the female body. The glowing anthropomorphic figures that emerge from Baker’s seedy dreamscapes hint at the possibility of a public arena where fluid notions of gender might thrive. “We learn who we are by blending into others,” Baker says. “It requires bouncing between people who view the world differently.”