Teresa Baker Willow Creek
Focus, September 19, 2025
Through a mixed media practice combining artificial and natural materials together, Baker creates abstracted landscapes that explore vast space, and how we move, see and explore within them. The materials, texture, shapes, and colour relationships are guided by Baker’s Mandan/Hidatsa culture. In her practice, Baker imbues innate objects with culture and identity.
Teresa Baker’s practice is rooted in abstraction, where she engages with place, land, peoples, and history through material and form. Her work often begins with shape as a point of departure, using it as a way to guide both process and meaning. Willow Creek, created specifically for the window at Nordenhake focus, reflects this approach.
For this piece, Baker pushed shape to a more exaggerated state, allowing it to shift and evolve over time. Working on the ground with yarn, she moved between negotiations of colour and form, responding intuitively to the changing composition. The inner shapes guide the eye across the work, oscillating between references to field marks in the landscape and textural, gestural movements. Planes overlap and recede, creating a rhythm that mirrors the fluid relationship between natural forms and abstraction.
Through this process, Baker continues her exploration of how land and lived histories can be expressed through abstraction, giving form to both memory and presence.