Artist Statement
Bay’s artistic practice is characterized by hybrid, installative-sculptural forms that unfold through long-term processes of research and imagination. A continuous investigation of objects through 3D modelling, alongside an intensive engagement with materiality and its inscribed layers of meaning in the studio, gives this process its concrete form.
Bay’s works emerge at the intersection of autobiographical experience, social observation, and political reflection.
Central to the work is the interplay of materiality, body, and cultural codes, a framework in which personal and collective layers of meaning interweave and are continuously renegotiated. The works unite a classically informed formal language with a deliberate wink, generating a productive ambivalence from which their authenticity arises.
Bay understands art as a public space of active participation. The works can be expressive or sensible, forceful or gentle, yet always carried by the conviction that art does not merely reflect social reality, but actively participates in shaping it.
Bay’s practice brings together two artistic teaching traditions that occupy methodologically and conceptually distinct positions, entering into a generative tension within the work. The tradition of classical metal sculpture enables a sovereign, autonomous engagement with a material that remains consistently present throughout Bay’s practice. The traces of making are not erased, but understood as testimonies of artistic agency, a deliberate counterposition to the aesthetics of industrial production. The training in installative practice extends this grounded sculptural knowledge through a complex understanding of space that encompasses the physical, digital, social, and political in equal measure. Materiality is understood not as a neutral carrier, but as an independent agent that expands the conceptual dimension of the work.
Bay works in series that can exist as individual sculptures or be brought together into complex installations. The works frequently stand in dialogical relationship to one another, functioning as retellings or continuations. The distinction between a completed work and its reinterpretation is not taken as given, but actively interrogated as a conceptual field of tension. For Bay, artistic practice is an open process of continuous reflection, one that does not exempt even the reimagination of its own archive.