Baker Artist Portfolios

I am a faith-based, highly over-educated, autistic savant and racial justice-oriented multi-disciplined indigenous Irish creative who has resided in Baltimore on a c continuous basis from December 2012 when I bought a house on Sherwood Ave just south of Northern Parkway and between Loch Raven and The Alameda. In this Portfolio space I am limiting myself to presenting one aspect of my creative, that of an "Alternative Labyrinth Designer." This dimension of my visual artwork production began in the early spring of 2015, and is totally rooted in Baltimore City history and some of its people. The Sherwood Ave. house I owned was both my first and last home owned by me. It's a corner house, with hills coming up to that corner both from the east and from the north. I had front, side, and back yards all in need of serious work and upgrading at the time I bought the house. Because of its position on my street across from an elementary/middle school, my front yard was (unbeknownst to me for the first year I lived there) causing much consternation in my neighbors to my east who all felt the condition of my front yard reflected on their property values, a matter they hinted at indirectly to me for my whole first year there, with questions like, "So, Lucy, what do you think you'll be doing with that front yard of yours, it does look like that tree there is dying don't you think? Etc. I finally got around to doing something about it separate from their prodding, because I wanted a garden and that seemed the best place sunlight wise, to have a garden. The side yard was fenced in. The back yard was a pretty hilly place down to the alley, no steps, and through which I had to carry out my trash via a basement back door. It was an unsafe walk for me in bad weather, so I tackled it second. In the back of my mind, I thought some kind of gazebo or small labyrinth for the side yard would be my final outdoor renovations. Then tragedy hit Baltimore when Freddie Grey was killed by police. I felt the Baltimore's black community's pain of that tragedy in every part of my being, particularly when I was out driving during the period when the curfew was imposed, and particularly the pain of Baltimore's west side young people who were being mercilessly characterized by the media, along with Baltimore as a whole, as just a bunch of horrendous thugs who all belonged locked up. I decided a labyrinth in my side yard should be a place where any and all could come and "walk" the streets metaphorically of Baltimore, the real Baltimore, the vibrantly creative and spiritually based and community oriented Baltimore, with pictures posted on each of the three fences around the side yard as well as on the side wall of my house. It would not just have a center as the goal to reach walking, it would have twelve rest-and-reflect places to stop, modeled after a generic two-word phrase evoking each of the 12-Steps of all the self-healing Anonymous groups around the world. The landscaping of that labyrinth never happened, for reasons I believe were holy-Spirit-based and driven, and another story for another day. What happened instead was my first templates for that labyrinth were made of cut up sheets, paper plates, yellow envelopes, permanent makers, lots of masking and painters and other types of tape laid out on the hardwood floors extending from my living room into my dining room. Those first templates were then test-walked by an interesting and odd collection of people for a wide range of reasons, including the current police commissioner of Baltimore, whose wedding dance for his wedding which occurred about 2 months after Freddie Grey was killed was a dance I choreographed for him. To make this long story short at this point, the floor templates were then reduced totally by hand to what I called labyrinth blueprints, on cheap flip chart paper, and colored in with the cheapest marker I could find. Each labyrinth designed seemed destined to spawn another one, until I realized I was creating a whole family of them. then the goal became "completing the family," which then became 3 families, each with 12 members. Flip chart paper with cheap markers was a recipe for self-destructing labyrinth blueprints over time, so I began laminating them at Staples. Random fellow customers began commenting on them, asking me if I'd considered making them a ministry, a coloring book, a calendar, etc. All I still wanted was a design that fit my side yard and my purpose for that side yard labyrinth, a design which kept eluding me, even as all these other people saw in my labyrinths other purposes, other social spaces, as the home for my labyrinths. In the process, each design was a powerful healing experience for me personally. All my designs were eventually converted into artwork or destroyed, and all but one maintained the underlying purpose among others of being fully landscaped one way or another as well as serving as a table top or finger labyrinth as well. The one exception is my "Forgiveness Labyrinth," finger labyrinth which has seven sequentially linked paths each of 70 "finger step" indications painted and drawn into the seven distinct linked paths to the center. My most unique labyrinth is one I designed to be walked after being memorized by folks in solitary confinement in either detention centers or prisons. I have done several "sip-and-paint" small workshops with that labyrinth. For the last two years, I have explored and studied and experimented with color in all its dimensions in painting sets of my labyrinths in one coloring style or another. Why most recent discovery was using permanent markers in a way that created two works of art with one application of colored markers, that application bleeding through the paper to the back side. I no longer use flip chart paper, but rather blue print paper of the sort that staples uses to print out large blueprints for its customers. A curated set of those labyrinths is what I want to show case here. My next projects are the coloring books folks have asked for and the calendars. I realize this is more a short memoir piece rather than a bio, no paragraph breaks. My writing style here flows directly from my neurodivergent indigenous Irish creative "wiring." :)