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Coast Explorer Magazine

Oregon Home Magazine

Marcy Baker is a matchmaker, of sorts. She sees relationships between shapes and patinas, and creates mixed-media collages that make the most of such materials as found metal and map fragments. "I like discovering connections between two pieces that, to me, say they belong together," she says. "I'm just the one who helped them find each other." After 10 years of living in Santa Fe, N.M., Baker - who grew up near Ithaca, N.Y. - her husband, Bob, and their two golden retrievers, Sophie and Moses, relocated to Portland last year after two stints at Art in the Pearl. "We missed tall trees and the ocean," says the 42-year old, who has a B.F.A. in textile design from Syracuse University. "We loved Portland-the downtown, the friendly people." Now when Baker pines for big trees, she looks to her front yard, where two maple trees front her 1927 Craftsman. Indeed, she believes Oregon's landscape has altered her art. "I'd done relief printing and monotypes for years, adding found metal and scraps of documents to them, always on a white background so that they were sculptural (see Wild Blue Yonder, right). My work was uncluttered, which I attributed to the sparse landscape and the thin air. Here, my work is denser."

Take Chiles (above), done in a vintage cigar box. "Chiles has elements that are seemingly disparate-a part of a map, a rusty lid to an Ortega's chile can, a piece of a braille dictionary-but I see relationships between the elements," says Baker. "It's intuitive, how collage happens-that's the wonderful part of the process."

Her cigar boxes can be seen in July at the Mark Woolley Gallery (120 NW Ninth Avenue; 503-224-5475) in the Pearl District of Portland.