Meet Lauren Baker, The Artist Beloved By Lewis Hamilton & Dua Lipa

British artist Lauren Baker — whose collectors include Lewis Hamilton and Dua Lipa — invites Olivia Cole into her Hackney studio to talk neon, Nikola Tesla and planting 8,888 trees in the Amazon.

Artist’s Studio: Lauren Baker

Credit: Jemima Marriot

Working mostly in neon and other mediums of sculpture, British artist Lauren Baker has captured the attention of an impressive list of art lovers, from Lewis Hamilton to Dua Lipa, who have taken her sustainable message to heart. In public spaces, too, from the deserts of Nevada and Saudi Arabia to the Venice Biennale, she works where art meets activism. At Tate Modern, Baker created an interactive sound-wave installation as ‘an apology to Mother Earth on behalf of humans for the last 500 years of damage and decay’.

‘We’re guardians of Earth. This is our watch,’ she tells me, her works intended as ‘gentle ripples’ that can make us all more conscious of our impact. And it’s not just about ideas: she has undertaken to plant 8,888 trees in the Amazon, funded through her print sales. Representation by MTArt Agency has helped her amplify her message and reach new audiences globally.

Baker’s interest in nature extends to other dimensions. She takes inspiration from transcendental meditation, numerology, star-gazing and off-grid travels to alternative cultures. She quotes Nikola Tesla: ‘If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.’

Lauren Baker in her studio in Hackney with her dog, Pom Pom. Credit: Jemima Marriot

A favourite mantra in her work, which often incorporates text, is ‘the trees are watching’. We all know that plants are alive, but as Tesla would have it, they are vibrating at a frequency that is within the field of human consciousness. ‘Rocks are alive as well. We’re made of stardust. Our ancestors are like fossils in the rocks.’ This sense that natural objects are sacred inspires her Earth Totem works, which can be small enough to collect or made to a larger scale — for example, for Burning Man festival.

As the proud daughter of a midwife and an engineer, her time with her dad involved travelling with him and her brothers in Africa. These family trips were a world away from day-to-day life in a tough part of Middlesborough; at home, her favourite view from the family’s high-rise was of the night skies.

Today, she loves getting into the raw landscape, exploring the Peruvian Amazon and other remote parts of South America, using the Gallery Climate Coalition to track her own impact. At home, her routine starts with being in nature on the canal in London Fields with her dog. Appropriately for an artist so inspired by the mystical, she lives in a converted chapel. Here and in her studio, she is a night owl, so work in earnest might start as late as midnight. Some things don’t change, and after dark is still the best time to dream her way to new perspectives.

Lauren Baker is exhibiting at the Jaro Gallery in Jersey in November. laurenbakerart.com