Encompassing drawing, printmaking and painting, Baker’s work creates a more accepting world for women, exploring and redefining modern perceptions of joy, acceptance, and home. She says: I’ve been developing my women-centred, surreal world for the past few years. My drawings combine imagined ideals and dreams with memories and impressions of real places I’ve loved. My process begins in Brooklyn on the walk to my studio as I observe and collect colour palettes and anthropomorphic shapes. Once I’m back at the studio, I work intuitively and from memory, incorporating visualisation meditation. I deliberately use a labour-intensive medium – coloured pencil on paper, in a ritualistic manner, as a way of honouring my subject matter.”

Medjeral-Thomas adds: “Lydia’s dreamscapes are beautifully poetic and confident and are women-centred environments where fantasy, the spiritual and anatomy intermingle. A tremendous amount of labour-intensive mark-making and layering of colour creates the most arresting ‘glow’ to the works. I’m very much drawn to traditional mediums such as painting and, in this case, works on paper, where artists are interpreting their chosen medium in very unique and contemporary ways and where artists are challenging expectations and expanding dialogues of what their medium can deliver. Colour pencil has associations with childhood and drawing and there is a beautiful tenderness to this which Lydia then builds upon with her own experience of living within a female body and interpretations of cycles of time and change. The undeniable intimacy and otherworldliness of Lydia’s world intrigues, awes and haunts me.”

You can experience Lydia’s world for yourself at London Art Fair at Wilder Gallery’s Stand P13, and in the group show ‘A Suitable Accomplishment’ at Trotter & Sholer in New York from January 14.