Mara Baker
I am an interdisciplinary artist who combines traditional fiber processes, found materials, animation, light, and video to create multi-dimensional installations and paintings. My work is an extended meditation on the intersection of impermanence and regeneration. I combine found and newly made materials to create fragile, transient structures that echo the fragility of our material systems. Salvaged residues from the urban environment are transmuted and given new lives in my studio. A broken light grid, once used to diffuse and scatter light in an office complex becomes a light and color machine. Weathered fishing ropes from a junkyard in Maine lend their history and resonance to my sculptural weavings. Wildflowers collected in empty lots throughout the city become vibrant natural dyes. I reuse materials over and over, further connecting the work to the ethics of recycling and regeneration. Each project builds on the last, often deconstructing and reconstructing elements of previous installations and paintings responding to the architecture and context of each site or surface.
