Baker Artist Portfolios

I am an interdisciplinary and community-based artist whose practice centers on co-creation with an ever-expanding collection of hand-crafted ceramic musical instruments. Working with clay as both material and collaborator, I develop sculptural instruments with intuitive, microtonal tunings, alongside improvisational performances with acoustic instruments and electronics, electroacoustic compositions, and educational workshops and residencies for participants of all ages and backgrounds. Across these forms, sound functions 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 explores 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 approach to instrument-making and sound 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. 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.

Through the processes of building, composing, and performing with historical reconstructions of these instruments, I came to experience them as messengers that carry cultural memory and enduring ecological wisdom. Despite temporal and geographic distance, these instruments offer a means of remembering, through the body and the senses, a deep awareness of human interdependence with the more-than-human world. In community settings, these encounters become opportunities for shared reflection, intercultural, and intergenerational exchange.

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, while remaining rooted in place-based and community-engaged contexts. Figures such as the Great Blue Heron, Timber Rattlesnake, Sweet Gum Tree, and Brain Coral emerge as collaborators and touchstones, guiding my engagement with local ecologies and collective memory. Along these pathways, my work seeks to reconnect participants with a shared human inheritance; one in which sound carries ancestral knowledge of interconnectedness, and can remind us of relationality that is rooted in responsibility and care.