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The Verge narrates memories of artist Jennifer Baker and her experiences of growing up on the Barwon Darling River System of Western New South Wales and her gratitude for a childhood rich in nature, friendships, open space, and long peaceful drives.  Familiarity with the open road continues as an adult, with long journeys to meet family, experience nature, and in search of home.

The Verge explores deep connection to the beauty and fragility of inland river systems familiar to Baker and expresses the preciousness of stock routes and roadside reserves as places of great ecological, cultural and historical value. The works consider the strength and vulnerability of the dry open forests and Mitchell grass plains within surviving roadside reserves.

While gratitude underpins much of Baker’s work, there is an undeniable undercurrent of grief. There is a duality which celebrates the gifts of her colonial upbringing but also grief for what it has cost, for what is lost, what is endangered and disappearing and for what cannot be restored. This duality leads her to find ways to make work with grace and to consider and minimise her personal ecological footprint.

Baker questions why humanity may consider their homes most important and not the homes of the creatures who share the planet with us.

Baker’s work holds the emotional complexity of life, the “she’ll be right mate…, no worries…, it’s ok it made me stronger…, it was meant to be…”, all those self-supporting statements told to help make sense of disharmony.

The Verge is also a meditation on thresholds – between belonging and displacement, breakdown and breakthrough and Baker currently finds herself considering the myth of Vasa Lisa as told by Clarissa Pinkola Estes; a story of a young girl who is tasked with seemingly impossible ventures but finds her way through the tests put upon her and ultimately finds her path home again.

During long drives, we peek through windows of other lives and other cultures and have time to contemplate our paths and choices, and time for thoughts which help traverse and make sense of circumstance.

Baker holds the philosophy that there is life force in everything, even seemingly inanimate objects. Memorialising heritage and seeking connection, she works with natural and discarded material such as old fencing wire, rusted machinery components, weathered timber, collected soil, charcoal, repurposed paper and worn cloth. Her familial and found roadside materials speak of passing seasons and the stories which shaped them. She often reuses material, breaking down previous work and reforming it. Baker is drawn to materials marked by time. The materials become vessels of familiarity, grief, gratitude and ecological awareness.

Baker expands this in her comments, “Some of the material in The Verge has travelled with me for over a decade, in the back of the car, or in storage wherever I am living, waiting for the time when I pick it up and include it in a work. It brings me joy to use found materials and to create simple work. It brings me peace and contentment, and I love that the material and I go on a journey together, finding our path through the thick of it all”

Mostly The Verge is about grace and gratitude, connecting the past to now and considering the path ahead.