Baker Artist Portfolios

I am an interdisciplinary artist who co-creates with an ever-growing collection of sculptural musical instruments, including flutes, horns, trumpets, noise generators, bells, rattles, and whistling bottles, that I hand-craft with clay.

My work can take different forms: zoomorphic instruments with intuitive, microtonal tunings, improvisational performances, electroacoustic compositions, and educational workshops and residencies for all ages. These different expressive channels allow me to explore in depth themes of memory, kinship, and myth, as well as sound itself; its ability to induce altered states of consciousness and its power to generate collective moments of shared emotions and connection.

I was initiated into Pre-Columbian instrument-making traditions under the tutelage of composer and educator Alejandro Iglesias Rossi and musicologist and educator Susana Ferreres, at the National University of Argentina at Tres de Febrero. Within the framework of an innovative artistic-academic program, and with the Orchestra of Indigenous Instruments and New Technologies, we were taught to recognize historic sound artifacts as cosmographic objects; vessels of visual, sonic, and energetic information that speak to us of other ways of seeing and being in the world.

As we learned to build, play, and compose with these powerful instruments, we came to experience them as messengers that carry the timeless wisdom of the sophisticated cultures that created them. Our visionary teachers passed on to us the understanding that, despite temporal and cultural distance, these instruments can help us to remember a deep knowing within ourselves, of our interdependence with our living, sacred world.

Take, for example, a Whistling Bottle, created by a Vicus artist of modern-day Peru over 1,000 years ago, that brings forth in stunning form and evocative sound the vision of a Guacamayo, a bird held in deep cultural and geographically specific relationship. As I gaze at the artifact, play it, and hear its sounds, I feel invitation: can I engage my sensitivity, to look, to listen, to feel more deeply, the living world around me? I am reminded to examine my own memory, family history, and connection to land, for the threads of story that reveal my web of kinship with the more-than-human world. And I feel called to examine the state of my relations.

Since returning to the US after 12 years in Argentina, I’ve begun to explore this invitation by reimagining musical instruments of the Pre-Columbian Americas; diving deep into primordial sound technologies through the lens of personal narrative and regional mythology. Great Blue Heron, Timber Rattler, Sweet Gum Tree, Brain Coral; along the pathways worn deep by kinship in my own life, I can reconnect with the touchstone of our common human heritage – where our inner wisdom still sings about the age-old truth of interconnectedness and mutual responsibility.

In my capacity as an instrument-maker and specialist in Pre-Columbian musical instruments, I occasionally undertake, with great reverence and care, projects to build historic replicas of ancient musical instruments. I do not build historic replicas to sell, and share them strictly as part of educational demonstrations, and in collaboration with institutions like the Walters Art Museum to deepen our understanding of these important artifacts.