Megan Baker investigates Old Master paintings, reflecting on the circularity of art history by drawing inspiration from artists such as Rubens, Titian, and the Pre-Raphaelites. Revisiting these influences through a contemporary lens, Baker’s lyrical abstractions transform into dream-like landscapes. Exploring moments of stillness within nature, the artist reflects on our contained state as human beings, while evoking a quiet sense of comfort in solitude.

Unfolding through layers of impasto, Baker’s oil paintings suggest an ever-changing state of being, where fragmented and gestural figures are continually interrupted by the immediacy and texture of the paint itself. Rooted in the physicality of the medium, Baker’s practice is centred on the way time can be experienced through painting. She uses paint as a means to expand and extend time, in a world where everyday encounters often feel instant and condensed. In turn, the perception of time shifts and evolves as one is drawn into the surface, absorbed in the search for the next hidden detail.

Memory, and the fluid way in which we remember, is another key concern for the artist. Echoing the soft hills and faint glow of British landscapes, the rose pinks and deep greens that permeate Baker’s canvases carry a sense of the familiar - recognisable even if never truly seen. The atmosphere the artist conjures is subjective, each viewer uniquely perceiving a world while lost in private contemplation. Baker puts us in touch with someplace else, somewhere outside our immediate field of vision, nurturing an idealised and romantic perception of the natural scenes we hold in memory.

Multiple dualities collide in Baker’s practice: abstraction and figuration, the real and the imagined, the hidden and the found all coexist across the pictorial surface. Paint shifts back and forth, always located in this in-between state where nothing is fixed. This plurality is reflective of Baker’s wide array of influences, spanning Old Masters, literature, and cinematography - as well as her own poetry, which she writes to accompany and inform her work, further deepening the layered narratives within her paintings.