Hello, my name is Finley Baker, I am an interdisciplinary artist that makes work about the environment and personal identity. My video piece, ‘Where Stories Repeat Themselves’ is a memorial to the land around me. It is a personal archive of experience in the places I find myself exploring often. The videos that are the backdrop to the monotypes were collected over a three year period. They depict many different places such as Colorado, Nebraska, Utah and Texas, and many different moments like lightning in the Rocky Mountains, cows crossing an irrigation ditch, and herons in coastal marshlands, to name a few.
The videos have been blurred and digitally integrated with monotypes - a printmaking process where I used intuitive additive and reductive mark making to create an image on a plexi glass plate and then I printed onto paper with an etching press. The act of creating the monotypes, the instances of reflection that were integral in their making, allowed me to further imbed the memory and experience of these moments into my psyche. By digitally blending the physical monotype with the video I am shifting the focus from the actual experience to the memory and reflection of the experience. When the small things, the stories of the land that resonate with us are gone, the memory will remain.
