It nearly always starts with a gleeful moment of hypocrisy. When, in the studio, I do something I agree with – but I also shouldn’t, or also don’t at all. When something feels rightly wrong, on some level. When a material resembles something, but also is another, very different or opposing thing, quite suspiciously.
A material – distinct from ‘matter’ – is a stage of an evolution, sometimes over a long time, of a human impulse or a solution for a need. It is a strata of contradictory approaches to the world: risks, costs and benefits, actions for both better and worse (after all, development and destruction are mostly the same process, just from different perspectives).
If a contradiction is more simply a way of interpreting a state of affairs – two things of equal properties countering one another equally – then hypocrisy is more of a skew-whiff human mannerism: to choose to appear one way that is at odds with one’s ‘true nature’. A mismatch between appearance and substance is nearly always framed as societally illegitimate. I have for a long time found this negative-coded relationship of convenience between ideas of core-ness (invisible or inaccessible) and surfaces alluring.
I work with material hypocrisies, where I find them. Materials around us contain plenty of fractures, and failed moralisms, hiding in plain sight. Sometimes they feel like crises in themselves. A flare, dynamite or fuse-like object, hand-held size, made from copper, plaster and cardboard, I find misleading. But misleading in the way that an accidental turn can lead you to a short-cut. – Josephine Baker, reflections on Deep down, so bright
Combining large reliefs made of asphalt roofing felt with small sculptural and drawing works, Baker furthers her interest in the overlap between the emotional and the infrastructural. The title is both a saccharine expression of positivity, and a reference to “ancient sunshine”, a poetic scientific phrase used to describe coal, oil, and natural gas. Using readily-available building materials such as bitumen sealants, copper cabling, and plaster, Baker explores the way extraction industries are embedded in our cities and built environments, and the way that both feelings and fossil fuels invisibly shape and determine our world.
Well Projects is open Friday – Saturday, 12pm – 5pm during exhibition periods.
View the exhibition catalogue here.
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Josephine Baker (b.1990, London, UK), currently lives and works in London. She completed her BA at Central Saint Martins (London) in 2012, and received her postgraduate diploma from the Royal Academy Schools (London) in 2017. Her work has been included in institutional exhibitions internationally, including at the British Museum, Gustav Luebcke Museum (Hamm, Germany), and MACA (Beijing). Recent solo exhibitions include: Editors, Gallery daSein, Shenzhen (2025); Prime Movers, Nir Altman, Munich (2024); Water-resistance, St. Chads, London (2023); Frieze London Focus Section solo presentation (2022); Clear Out the Wounds Closest To the Sun, V.O. Curations, London (2021); and The Land Lies, ChertLüdde Bungalow, Berlin (2020). She is an Associate Lecturer in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art, London.