Baker Artist Portfolios

ARTIST STATEMENT

I have long been absorbed in understanding the processes underlying patterns of growth and form in nature. My photographs and photo-based sculptures interpret landscapes in terms of the forces that shaped them: the interaction between geology, ecology, human behavior, and the built environment. Digital photography has become my principal medium for its ability to capture complex transient phenomena from different vantage points. It has also opened creative and expressive possibilities, including 3D scanning landscapes with photogrammetry, or mining photos from historical archives and juxtaposing, compositing, or layering them with my own. I have explored landscapes from the remote polar environments of Antarctica and Greenland to urban Los Angeles and Baltimore. Engaging with these environments through the photographic process, I seek to foster a deeper understanding and emotional connection to landscapes for myself and for viewers.

I exhibit my work in public and for-profit art galleries and academic institutions. This portfolio focuses on two projects: Foreign Objects: The Transformation of a Greenlandic Landscape is a work in progress that I plan to publish as a photo book about Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, a former indigenous hunting ground that served as a Cold War US air base from 1941 to 1992, which altered the landscape ecologically and culturally. Walking in Antarctica consists of photographs, sculptures from 3D scans of geological formations, and a first-person audio tour, resulting from a seven-week residency in Antarctica in 2015 through the National Science Foundation Antarctic Artists and Writers Program.

DETAILED PROJECT DESCRIPTIONS

Foreign Objects: The Transformation of a Greenlandic Landscape — Although I have been working on this project since 2020, the topic of US-Greenlandic relations has vaulted into Combining my photographs, vintage photos from in Danish and US archives of similar sites, and short texts, the project explores how human decisions and activity over the past 80 years — including melting of the Greenland ice cap due to climate change — have strikingly altered the land and ecology of Kangerlussuaq both physically and culturally into a distinctive, often quirky and surreal,environment unlike the rest of Greenland. The transformation was set in motion in 1941 when the United States Air Force arrived and built Sondrestrom Air Base, which expanded during the Cold War and operated until 1992. Kangerlussuaq would seem a strange place to attract extensive investment from the United States and Europe, a place remote even by Greenlandic standards and without natural resources to exploit. Yet it became the site of ambitious scientific and corporate initiatives that have left a lasting impact on the ecology, topography, and cultural meanings of the land. These include the longest maintained road in Greenland and the only one that provides access to the edge of the ice sheet that covers 80% of the country, and an estimated 20,000 musk oxen descended from just 27 imported here. These developments all originate with the arrival of an “unnatural resource” — the military grade runway built by the American Air Force to land large, heavy airplanes that led to the importation of “foreign objects” — and objectives — that followed. 

A Rubys Award grant from the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation funded the first of three extended trips there in 2021. In 2023 I collaborated with Dorthe Katrine Olsen, director of the Sisimiut and Kangerlussuaq Museums, to mount a permanent two-room exhibition featuring her photographs at the Kangerlussuaq Museum, funded by a cultural grant from the US Embassy in Copenhagen. Since then I have been working on a photography book that will be the first book of any kind in any language about Kangerlussuaq.

Although I have felt all along that investigating the ramifications of US Cold War defense history on this place was a topic of more than mere academic interest, Donald Trump’s stated desire for the U.S. to annex Greenland has abruptly turned debates about the country’s post-colonial future that went all but unnoticed outside Greenland and Denmark into a major global news story — one that is still unfolding..

Walking in Antarctica — 33 of the photographs and 4 sculptures from this project accompanied by a first-person audio tour premiered at Goucher College, Baltimore, in 2017-18, funded in part by grants from the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance and Puffin Foundation. It has been touring US museums and galleries under the auspices of ExhibitsUSA (eusa.org) since 2022, with nine confirmed venues in eight states scheduled as of January 2026. Works from the Antarctica project have also been featured in a rotating exhibition at Baltimore-Washington International Airport since 2017, where two photos have been enlarged to 7 x 10 feet. One photo enlarged to billboard size was also on view 2023-24 in a year-long outdoor exhibition of international photographers at the Palacio de las Aguas, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Works from the project have also been shown at Artscape in 2016 and 2017, and in the 2017 Trawick Prize Finalists exhibition. Since 2016, Glazer has been interviewed by several national and local media outlets about Antarctica, including Atlas Obscura and WYPR; featured on the cover and in the National Academy of Sciences' print magazine "Issues in Science and Technology"; and included in Habitat: Polar, an illustrated book to be published by international publisher Dorling Kindersley Ltd. (May 2026). Works from the project are in the collections of the Center for Art + Environment of the Nevada Museum of Art and the Fairfield University Art Museum.

BIO

Born in Bronx, New York, and raised in suburban New York City, Helen Glazer holds a BA in Art cum laude from Yale University and an MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art and attended Skowhegan School of Art. The first part of her career focused on drawing, painting, and painted wall reliefs. She has been exhibiting her work regularly since she was a graduate student, when a painting was selected for the 1976 Maryland Biennial at the Baltimore Museum of Art. She has also completed two public art mural commissions in Baltimore. Photography, which she studied extensively at Yale, served as a means of recording reference material for paintings and relief sculptures until 15 years ago, when it became her primary mode of expression as a way to capture and communicate the subtleties of complex natural forms. However, her past experiences working in other media still inform the way she perceives the world and presents it in her photographs. In 2013 she expanded her practice to integrate new photographic technologies, creating 3D scans from still photographs via photogrammetry and producing hand-painted sculpture from them, a process she continues to refine.