Baker Artist Portfolios

My work combines drawing, sculptural installation and the social/environmental practice of herbalism to investigate themes of ecosystem sustainability within the manufactured landscapes of the built environment. My focus is to question modern architecture and the modern mind-set by depicting a hybridization of overlapping structures that consider intersecting and deviating lines between protection, dominion and symbiosis. What are the ways in which conventional forms of building and automated convenience keep us compartmentalized within a dangerously abstracted relationship with nature and our own bodies? How do we have agency within these fixed monuments of permanence? Who are the players and what are the means for reclaiming non-human kinships for the reversal of cultural and climate upheaval? How do we see beyond the destabilizing objectification which numbs our sensorial capacity to commune with the intelligence of plants, animals and elemental forces? Like a seed, one or two marks on paper slowly germinate out in all directions leaving the demarcations between inside and outside space ambiguous. The presence of the occasional plant or animal serves as a reminder that human made structures have displaced these species yet their ghosts graze on another “plane” just beneath our feet. The placement of certain mundane elements takes on a mythic presence alluding to a time when dwellings were tools for connecting to and understanding elemental and celestial phenomenon. Images of modern material culture, such as used tires or reclaimed Plexiglas, point to the failures of capitalism, colonial ideas of “progress” and dead-end systems of waste. Billboards fashioned as chalkboards advertise a new form of learning as these living systems restructure themselves toward a new beginning.

Alyssa Dennis is an interdisciplinary artist, Earth activist, educator and clinical herbalist cultivating a small herbal sanctuary in Baltimore City. In addition to a BFA from the Maryland Institute Collage of Art and an MFA from Tulane University, she completed a three-year advanced training in medical herbalism, studied indigenous Amazonian plant medicine, and obtained certificates in permaculture design and straw bale and adobe building. From 2002 to 2007 she worked on multiple straw bale and green roof construction projects among other environmentally sustainable efforts, which continue to be a strong influence for the work she does today. For the past 20 plus years, she has garnered many gallery exhibitions, awards and residencies while expanding her studio practice into the collaborative realm to do concept illustration for internationally recognized organizations focused on ecosystem education and design. In 2004 she co-founded Current Space, an artist-run community art gallery and performance venue. In 2016 she started an environmental literacy venture called Eclipta Herbal. She is passionately dedicated to endeavors that promote ecological mutualism with all living beings.

“Modernity is the prosecution of the sensitive.” “The walls that civilization place between it & the wilds is numbness” “the fluid permeable nervous system of individual bodies begins to internalize those walls." Josh Schrei, The Emerald Podcast