Claire A Baker is a practising embroidery artist whose research is concerned with abandonment, memory, place and the lost, with a focus on the traditional and historical influences of textile craft and the positive intervention of modern technology. She explores texture, scale and negative space within her textile practice and her methodology is definitively informed by her concepts, which, in turn drives her practice forward and continually inspires multi-disciplinary processes and outcomes.

Claire has based her research work within the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone for the last five years, building archives and working in the field. One of her intentions is to ensure that some of the historical embroidery motifs peculiar to the Chernobyl area in Ukraine, are not forever lost due to the lack of future generations in that region and, the destruction of a community and its culture.

She set up the 26:86 Collective in 2015 leading a successful touring exhibition showing accessible, multidiscipline artworks based on the effects of the world’s worst nuclear accident and the effects thereof which are still prevalent today. This exhibition attracted over 12,000 visitors.

She has recently completed an MFA at Manchester Metropolitan University, is a lecturer at The Northern School of Art and works internationally as Arts Director of a festival held in Ukraine which supports the people still living in the Chernobyl exclusion zone.