Julie Druker | Sep 09, 2015


This year’s Sundance Artisan show in Maberly offered up an impressive lineup of the creations of local and not so local artists and artisans. Organized for the first time this year by the new owners of the Fall River Restaurant, Therese Steenberghe and Jeroen Kerrebijn, with the help of canoe maker Brent Kirkham, and photographer Paul Shuster, the show attracted close to 4000 guests over the three-day holiday weekend.

Among the impressive art work was the figurative art of Mary Lynn Baker of Addison, Ontario. Baker is a long ago graduate of the Ontario College of Art and design and she has been making her unique brand of high-flying fantasy figures both in the form of aerial papier-mâché sculptures and paintings for decades now. Much of her work seems familiar, which is likely due to the fact that she has been showcased on a number of TV shows, commercials and in various publications world wide. Her aerial sculptures are vibrant and buoyant, both literally and figuratively speaking; they often elicit a laugh or at the least a smile from those who see them. Because they hang in mid-air, just fastened with thin, invisible pieces of fishing line, they are constantly in movement, which makes them even more eye catching and a delight to behold in person.

These cheerful aerial subjects include winged pigs, flying everyday super humans, as well as lawyers dressed in their courtly attire, one in particular with one hand clutching a brief case and the other stretching forward in a simulated superman pose as he seems to cut through the ether almost effortlessly.

“I like to make anything that strikes me as fun,” Baker said when I visited her booth at the show, “and as far as I know, I am the only person who makes suspended kinetic sculptures because they are what people most seem to enjoy.”

For these figures, she uses her own long ago perfected recipe of papier-mâché, a specialized formula comprised of only flour and water, which she bakes in an oven. This gives the pieces their smooth surfaces which she later paints using household paint colours.

Sculpting is not everything for Baker; she has also been painting for decades and many of her canvases depict similar subject matter to the sculptures; cheerful and colourfully dressed couples and also larger groupings of people, most often women, dressed in brightly colored and patterned outfits and seemingly caught in an instant of joyous merriment. “I love to watch ordinary people when they are dancing at, let's say a wedding or some other event where they are having a really good time and seem to just really be getting out of themselves. These are people who may not be at the height of fashion and maybe aren't the best dancers but still, they are enjoying the moment and for me there is something very charming and interesting in that”. She is a muralist as well and has painted 16 large murals commissioned by the towns and schools of Brockville, Athens and Shelburne, Ontario.

While most of her work is not titled, her flying “super grandpa” is just one in a series that have included titles like “super guy”, and “super woman”. One free standing table-top sculpture depicts a woman in matching harlequin, horn-rimmed glasses and hat, sporting a spotted leopard patterned suit, and is loosely based on Andrea Martin's famed SCTV character, Edith Prickley.

Baker’s most recent paintings, which she paints in acrylics, have moved into the realm of personal memories and are more realistic in nature than her older, solely figurative works. Here she is painting cheerful scenes based on specific memories from her life. One shows a costume party on an ice rink that she remembers from long ago in Ottawa.

Baker was just one of 38 artists at the Sundance show, which, while under new management, still continues to offer some of the best work by artists and artisans from Eastern Ontario.

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