Steph Baker
Steph Baker is a contemporary abstract artist based in rural Norfolk, working primarily in acrylic and oil stick. Her practice moves between intimate works on paper and large-scale statement canvases, with a distinctive visual language of bold colour, expressive mark-making and abstraction.
In 2026, Steph completed a three-month residency at designermakers21 in Diss, where she developed Held Places, a body of work exploring landscape, memory and our emotional relationship with place.
She is a founding member and resident artist at BodyLand, an emerging artist-led creative community based at Wyken Vineyards in Suffolk, creating space for artistic practice, collaboration, conversation and connection.
Steph also creates large-scale original works and accepts selected commissions. Her earlier series, Mortal Canvas, explored cycles of life, loss and renewal through abstract forms influenced by microscopic and cellular structures.
Artist Statement
There are moments when we encounter something beautiful — a vast landscape, an extraordinary sky, a particular quality of light — and the response can feel almost physical. Awe, wonder, nostalgia, even tears. We can describe what we saw, but finding words for the magnitude of what we felt is much harder.
But these moments are not confined to landscape. They exist throughout the human experience: losing ourselves in music, giving birth, desire and sex, the visceral pain of loss, moments of profound connection or simply the sudden awareness of being completely alive. Experiences that are felt as much in the body as they are understood by the mind.
This is where my work begins.
I am not interested in faithfully reproducing a landscape. A photograph can record a view with far greater accuracy. I am interested in what remains after an experience has passed: the memory held in the mind and body, the colour, energy and emotion that somehow stay with us.
I use colour and abstract form as a language for those experiences. Landscape may provide a catalyst, but the painting becomes something else — an attempt to recapture the energy of a moment rather than its physical appearance.
And what is held within the work does not have to lead the viewer back to the same landscape, or even to a landscape at all. We each arrive with our own memory bank of awe, desire, joy, grief, connection and loss. A colour, mark or relationship between forms can unlock something entirely personal.
That is where, for me, the work becomes complete. I bring my own experience and energy to the painting, and the viewer recognises something of that energy within themselves. Somewhere in that exchange — between my experience and theirs — is where the magic lies.
