ART
As a visual artist, M.E. Baird has won several prizes and exhibited widely. He was recently awarded 1st place in the Maritime Art Prize, Australia (2023), with his piece The Loner from the Ghost Boat series. M.E. Baird has a background in music, art and architecture, including art direction for film, television, and digital media. He has also held academic and teaching scholar roles across multiple disciplines at various art and design schools and universities in New South Wales and Victoria.
Artist Statement: Duality, absence, and memory have been at the core of and dominated M.E. Baird’s three-decade-long art and music practice. This idea of duplexity stems from his upbringing—a childhood that, on one hand, was full of adventure, creativity, curiosity, and freedom to express, the other a tyrannical and oppressive Irish Catholic ethos that denies the creative spirit and self-expression – can there be rectification?
For all sales and/or commissions
Contact Paula Brennan at Pack Gallery Studio, NSW, Australia. - packgallerystudio@gmail.com
CURRENT SERIES
The Ghost Boats
In 2023, 'The Loner' from M.E. Baird’s Ghost Boat series was awarded 1st place in the Maritime Art Prize, Australia.
The form of a boat with its complex but elegant curves and planes has appeared in Baird’s work for decades. M.E. Baird’s initial attraction to boats and the sea came as a child, growing up in a Port Phillip Bay suburb and seeing their forms clustered at piers or as silhouetted cargo ships on the horizon gave him a great sense of calm and wonder. Who owned these boats, and who were those brave humans crewing these vessels to far-off and most likely exotic locations? However, this sense of calm and wonder would backflip when, as a teen, he was involved in a capsizing that trapped him underwater. An experience that would haunt him in dreams for decades to come.
Fast forward to 2019, and while undertaking treatment for stage 3 cancer, M.E. Baird, and perhaps entertaining mortality, strangely or by reason, became interested in boats again. This recent series sees the symbol of the boat primarily (but not always) as a portrait of the artist. Baird found himself at first unconsciously exploring his emotions, fears, and sense of uncertainty through these vessels. Here, you will find them in all their bleakness and austerity as motionless lone figures in what appears to be a barren seascape, either awaiting the tide to return or dry docking, taking refuge and repair from the deluge of life. Some of the ‘boats’ are haunted by unreconciled events, while others have a sense of contentment or inevitability. The coloured sphere/s are hope, an illuminated jewel, to give warmth, light, companionship and a sense of buoyancy.’ While the ‘boats’ sit, drift and fall.
Neural Vistas
What first appears whimsical becomes, with time, more potent. A theatrical event, a stage with actors. Some characters are elegant and posed, while others are mysterious and underwhelming. These works are based on dreams, meditations and the author's subconscious conjuring. They also share the strongest relationship to M.E. Baird’s songwriting.
Latency
Latency initially came about in response to the current housing and environmental destruction of land. They borrow ideas from the boat series but are still unresolved.
Below are a selection of smaller one-off works available for direct purchase. Email enquiries to M.E. Baird.
'GHOST BOAT' SERIES
'LATENCY' SERIES