Sophie Baker is a painter and film-maker. Sophie’s paintings are rooted in the Romantic tradition, and her work concerns itself above all with a subjective and individual response to the world around her. The main themes of her painting are those of buildings reclaimed; with the terror associated with the sudden collapse of man-made structures; with formality of gardens.

Her aesthetic is played out against a backdrop of the tension between man and the natural environment, perfectly represented in the motif of abandoned industrial sites — stripped of functionality and human purpose — left to be surrounded, filled and submerged by the relentless growth of plants. In turn, her paintings of high-roofed hot houses built beside banks of foliage explore man’s constant attempts to bring order upon the natural world — and draw us to consider the indeterminate areas that lie between the natural and man-made.

And it is in this ambiguous area, this gap between the wild and the built, that Sophie also invites the viewer to understand the painting both as artefact and as object to lead the imagination to wherever it will flower and grow.

The Waterpoint is a perfect space to act as host to the themes of Sophie’s work — an abandoned and then reclaimed industrial space — situated by the straightened urban rivers of the Regent’s Canal. A nature cultivated, abandoned, revived.