Claire Baker Art | Body X Earth

2023-2025 | Western Ghats, Maharashtra, India
Soon after I finished two years painting in the mountains of Western India, my host reported the python I co-existed with was killed by a weed-wacker. When I left, they cut the grassland habitat where I was painting. The python’s massive body—stretched, limp, bleeding—haunts me. I am engaged in an investigative, time-based, experiential search for somatic belonging—painting into futures where both the python and I can live.
My painting surfaces impact the viewer’s flesh by holding energies transferred from my existence outside. Each sensorial experience of sentience, such as a moving swarm of dragonflies or breeze twisting the light, is the catalyst for my hand to change its weight and speed. The tactility of my mark-making expresses connectivity; even if the viewer cannot name the dragonflies, they feel their presence in the sensitive shifts of touch. In the same manner, I spray the ground color of the painting surface in collaboration with the wind. The subtle shifts of tonality vary such that the viewer can sense the specificity of the lightness in vast sky or the weight in engulfing mud. The overall compositional rhythm holds opposing forces in tender balance: heavy and light, fast and slow, concrete and ineffable. My body weaves attunement with earth in an experience that becomes tangible for the viewer through the form of painting itself.
The nonviolent surrender of body to earth defines my notion of somatic belonging. When I paint, I make my body quiet and still to fully sense the life around me. This state intensifies with time—paintings happen in the experience of grass growing through me, transferring energy to the painted marks. I paint outside in engaged stillness, wrapped in a communal present of connection to a collective, multi-faceted, earthen body.
Amidst climate grief, my painting carves emotional space for acceptance, activation, and joy in relations with our changing earth. Through studying the classical Indian aesthetic concept of rasa—a Sanskrit word meaning the emotional sap or juice at the heart of a viewer’s experience of artwork—I am searching for an emotional sap of our ecological present through painting. My painting holds space beyond words to investigate energetic transfers between body and earth. Only in present attunement do we hold futures.
2023 | Vindhya Range, Madhya Pradesh, India
You see paintings.

I see earth.

I see earth moved into and

onto my paintings.

I offer the full resources

of my sensing body.

I move because the bird moves

so you can move.

So we might move together.

To experience each shift:

monsoon forces,

eruption of bird flight,

descent into night.
To sit on dirt in sunshine and darkness.

To be in the company of ants.

To address the air.

To track life with crushed earth.

To acknowledge what I am made of.

To feel the mark of my body on the earth.

To refract matter.

Co-presence in our passing.

To fly with the bird.

To mark its disappearance.
To look long. Hours. Days.

Then out of stillness.

Swift marks.
Earth marked,

Marked by earth,

A fleeting hold,

A slow letting go.
Motion reveals now.

Living forces held.

Being together.
[Body Earth]

2023-2025 | Western Ghats, Maharashtra, India

2023 | Vindhya Range, Madhya Pradesh, India