COMA is pleased to present Everything I Carry With Me, a solo exhibition by Teresa Baker (Mandan/Hidatsa - North Dakota. b.1985). This marks the artist’s first solo presentation in the Asia Pacific region and will be on view from 25 July through 23 August 2025.
Developed between Altadena, the Bay Area (at the Headlands Center for the Arts), and Montana, this new body of work reflects a deeply layered relationship between place, memory, and material. The Altadena fires in early 2025 forced Baker to reconsider both her physical environment and the conceptual framework of her practice, prompting the artist to work across multiple geographies. Despite this dislocation, the works maintain a sense of emotional and cultural continuity. “Where I work is not relevant,” Baker reflects. “I carry everything with me. The memories, feelings, and a cultural and historical understanding—they are constants and always there.”
AstroTurf, buffalo hide, yarn, bark, and paint remain central to Baker’s practice, but in this exhibition the use of green—both materially and symbolically—takes on new weight. Influenced by the Montanan landscape in Spring and Summer, an environment that is immediately accessible from the artist's studio, green becomes a dominant and grounding presence. It is emblematic of renewal—of life emerging from devastation, as grasses are often the first to regrow after fire. In some cases, the AstroTurf itself was salvaged from the aftermath of the fires—its survival as a material folded directly into the artwork.
Formally, this exhibition marks a shift. While Baker’s previous works often left the borders of the AstroTurf untouched—allowing its edges to remain quiet—here the boundaries are filled, dense, and alive. The edges become sites of activity and tension, while the central areas remain open into space: undefined, expansive, and generative. “The middle becomes a vessel,” Baker says, “a space for roaming, openness, possibility.”
In works such as Move In A Pattern, 2025, delicate threads of yarn are woven across each end of the composition, like the covers of a book splayed open. The center holds a constellation of buffalo hide and fiber—suggesting stargazing, storytelling, and an invisible thread connecting people across place and time. In Shuffling, 2025, slender bark fragments interrupt a vibrant blue field, calling to mind the face of a clock—subtly marking time’s passage while acting as an abstract map-making mechanism.
The exhibition’s title, Everything I Carry With Me, speaks to both the conceptual and the practical. It reflects the physical weight of a lived experience that places great importance on cultural inheritance, and ongoing movement, but also the very real reconsideration of what one holds onto after catastrophe—what we value, what we let go, and what we rebuild from.
This new body of work continues Baker’s investigation into the use of formal abstraction as a way to engage with land, history, and identity. Although through Everything I Carry With Me, the artist's perspective is more inward facing. For the first time, the title includes the “I” signalling a more personal vantage: one in which Baker reflects not only on place and physicality, but on what is held within herself, and then carried forward. These are not depictions of simply land, but of land as memory, as weight, as kin. What emerges is a moving and generous invitation to consider how we transport landscapes with us—not just across geography, but through time, spirit, and form.
