Baker Artist Portfolios

I am an interdisciplinary, community-based artist who co-creates with an ever-expanding collection of handcrafted ceramic musical instruments. Working with clay as living material, symbol, and collaborator - embodying cycles of memory, reciprocity, and transformation - I create sculptural instruments with intuitive, microtonal tunings, improvisational performances with instruments and electronics, electroacoustic compositions, and educational workshops and residencies for people of all ages and backgrounds. Across these forms, sound operates as a shared medium through which memory, kinship, and myth are activated, fostering embodied presence, collective listening, and moments of communal connection.

Together with plant, animal and bird-inspired flutes, horns, trumpets, noise generators, bells, rattles, and whistling bottles, I create music and programming that is grounded in nature-based spiritual perspectives in order to explore reverence as an ethical and aesthetic stance toward the living world. By engaging memory and ecological grief as embodied, material, and sensory forms of knowledge, my practice seeks to create spaces for reflection, mourning, and renewed relationship amid ecological precarity, often through participatory and community-centered forms.

My practice is deeply informed by my initiation into Pre-Columbian musical traditions under the mentorship of composer and educator Alejandro Iglesias Rossi and musicologist and educator Susana Ferreres at the National University of Tres de Febrero in Argentina. While completing a masters program in Musical Creation, New Technologies and Traditional Arts, and as a member of the Orchestra of Indigenous Instruments and New Technologies, I was trained within an innovative artistic-academic framework that understands historical sound artifacts as cosmographic objects; vessels of visual, sonic, and energetic knowledge that articulate alternative ways of perceiving and inhabiting the world. This framework continues to shape my commitment to knowledge-sharing, collective inquiry, and learning through making and listening.

For a decade, through the processes of building, composing and performing with historical reconstructions of ancient instruments, I came to experience them as messengers that carry cultural memory and enduring ecological wisdom. Despite temporal and geographic distance, these instruments - in their forms, iconographies, and sounds - offer a means of remembering, through the body and the senses, a deep awareness of human interdependence with the more-than-human world.

Since returning to the United States after twelve years in Argentina, my practice has shifted to reimagining these historical sound technologies through the lens of personal narrative and regional mythology. Beings such as Great Blue Heron, Timber Rattlesnake, Sweet Gum Tree, and Brain Coral emerge as touchstones and collaborators, tracing my relationship with local ecologies and guiding my work with the collective memory rooted in these lands. Together with these instruments, I explore place-based and community-engaged contexts through music and educational programming in order to reawaken within myself and others a sense of our shared human inheritance of interconnectedness and of relationality that is rooted in responsibility and care.