By Liam Ross Baker
2025
oil on board
40.5x30.5cm unframed
$1,750
ARTIST STATEMENT
Liam Ross Baker is an emerging artist based in Tasmania’s Huon Valley.
Baker’s practice critiques aspects of culture through large scale paintings of portraits, narrative scenes and still life interpretations. Through his use of colour and subject, Baker’s work reveals the uncanny nature of the familiar, capturing a sense of unease that reflects on broader social anxieties.
Baker demonstrates a degree of irony within his work, placing party hats, flags and dabs of face paint on figures who at times seem to have been captured at a personal moment of reflection, action or inaction. However, this dry humour masks a more considered enquiry into day-to-day life, and how personal experiences help to inform a sense of place. Driven by moral observations of contemporary Australia - painting provides Baker a freedom to investigate our cultural relationships and challenge how we see and make sense of the world.
BIO
Liam Ross Baker is an artist born in southern Lutruwita/Tasmania in 1998. He completed a Bachelor of Fine Art at the University of Tasmania in 2021, exhibiting in numerous group shows since. In 2021, Baker undertook a residency at the Henry Jones Art Hotel after taking out the packing room prize, as a finalist in the Henry Jones Art Prize. He was also selected as the people choice at the Tidal Art Award in 2023 and shown in multiple exhibitions at Despard Gallery in Hobart, Tasmania.
Baker's paintings are predominantly made using oils on canvas and board exploring figuration and narrative. He grew up in southern Tasmania in the small fishing town of Dover where he was surrounded by the beautiful natural scenery and landscapes, yet he took a shine for the endless tales and stories of lives lived in and around the town, and the industries that accompanied the local area. Through this love for the human experience, he found an intense interest in his direct life and surroundings, using his own experience to unpack and question culture, industry and people through narrative, symbology and most importantly figuration.
These works are the early makings of exploration for an upcoming solo exhibition at Boom Gallery in September entitled, 'The Bread, The Bird And The Baker’ in which Baker explores and breaks down facets of daily life through a tongue in cheek yet sincere and personal scope.
