Cynthia Camlin
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Cynthia Camlin studied painting as a post-baccalaureate student at Yale University and received her MFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Texas at Austin in 2000. Previously she received a BA from Duke University in English Literature and Art and an MA from the University of Virginia in Religious Studies. Camlin's work has been shown in numerous national and regional group and solo exhibitions. In 2003 she was nominated for the Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Award. She is currently Assistant Professor of Painting at Western Washington University. She previously taught at the University of Texas at Austin, Ringling College of Art and Design, and West Virginia University. From 2001 to 2004 Camlin was the founding director of Creative Research Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin.
Anna McKee
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Anna McKee received her BA from Evergreen State College and an MLA in Landscape Architecture and Urban Design from the University of Washington. Her work is informed by an interest in human history, environmental sciences and the naturalist tradition, for its contemplative examination of the land. In 2008, McKee began looking at glaciers and ice sheets as a means to tell stories about geologic change. For this project, she traveled to a research camp on the West Antarctic plateau with the National Science Foundation's Artists and Writers Program, the National Ice Core Laboratory and Mt Waddington in British Columbia to observe ice coring research. The paintings in Ice Stories explore the tension between the stability of immense ice sheets and the recession of outlet glaciers, suggesting change and unpredictability. Her etchings of a research field camp in Antarctica portray this vast space barely interrupted by human activities. McKee's work is supported in part by a generous grant by 4Culture.
Maria Coryell-Martin
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Maria Coryell-Martin majored in studio art at Carleton College in 2004 and was awarded a Thomas J Watson Fellowship to paint around the world for the following year. During three months in Greenland, she visited scientific research stations and completed a seven week residency with the Upernavik Museum in 2005. Inspired by the polar environment and the tradition of traveling artists as naturalists and educators, she has since painted in Antarctica as artist-in-residence with Quark Expeditions (2006, 2008), as well as returned to Greenland in 2010 to join a walrus scientist's field camp. The rugged and expansive polar regions are experiencing accelerated warming due to climate change, and their ecosystems with specialized flora and fauna are in a delicate balance. Coryell-Martin's field sketches in Ice Stories illustrate daily life of walrus research in Greenland and her studio paintings contrast atmospheric spaces with vulnerable elements of the polar environment.
