I’m a visual artist who makes artist’s books. I write and experiment with historical and contemporary photographic processes, printmaking, collage and reappropriation. I’m interested in the potential of relationships between image, text and material qualities, and the possibilities of reproduction. Play, process, research, reflection and collaboration are key aspects of my practice. Originally from the Netherlands, I’m based in Hastings, UK.
Books are published by Negative Press London (www.neg-press.com), an imprint I established in 2012.
Most of my work relates to bodies and violence. Recent projects and related artist’s books address wildlife, nature, climate collapse and the violent relationship of humans towards the natural world and to ourselves:
• everything is so very much connected (Negative Press, 2025) is a book collating a mail art collage correspondence with artist Sarah Bodman. In art and writing we respond to topics relating to nature, the environment and climate collapse.
• Plastic Particles In My Testicles (Negative Press, 2025) confronts the unsettling reality of microplastics pollution inside human bodies in a glossy photography book illustrated with plastic analogue positive film photography.
• Magnificent Bodies (Negative Press, 2024). A box set of photographs of dead insects hand-printed at an enormous scale highlights the demise of flying insect numbers in the UK while showing the magnificent beauty of individual insects.
• Eighteen Years Old (Negative Press, 2024). In a tabloid newspaper of photographs of broken trees and writing without punctuation, I recall the evening a gang of queer bashers set out to attack me.
• Some Queer Animals (Negative Press, 2023) collates life size postmortem cameraless contact printed cyanotype portraits of British wildlife killed on roads and in the landscape of one English village, the process of making proposing a mutually caring relationship with wildlife and nature, to nurture not destroy. Shortlist 2024 Author Book Award, Arles Les Rencontres de la Photographie, France. Shortlist EI2024 Photobook Award, Braga, Portugal. Finalist Photobooks Photofrome 2025, Frome, UK
Books from Negative Press London are in international collections including Museum of Modern Art Library, New York, US; Wellcome Foundation Library, London, UK; National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK; Artists’ Book Collection, Bavarian State Library, Munich, Germany; Bibliothèque Musée Français de la Photographie, Bièvres, France; Artist Book Collection, Bower Ashton Library, University of West England, UK; National Poetry Library, London, UK.
Exhibitions include Photofusion, London; Bruce Castle Museum, London; La Mécanique Génerale, Arles, France; Winchester Gallery, Winchester; Bower Ashton Library, Bristol; Foyles Gallery, London; Dutch Centre, London; Ruskin Gallery, Cambridge; Bury Art Museum, Bury; and Marginal Arts Festival, Roanoke, Virginia, US.
Graduating in 2019 from Cambridge School of Art, my MA Fine Art show was awarded the Cambridge Artspace Residency. My writing appears in short fiction anthologies, journals and academic publications.
roelofbakker(@)mac.com
@roelof_bakker
www.neg-press.com
CV ︎︎︎