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Reception & Book Signing: "When We Were Ocean" by Half Moon Bay artist Christina Conklin
Christina Conklin's works on paper employ seaweed, inks, watercolors, and natural pigments. Her compositions can be seen as documentation of the elemental processes of life, magnified microscopic organisms and their worlds, polar landscapes, and maps. Her recent work conjures images of spirit animals.
Conklin thinks deeply about the Earth’s 4.5-billion-year-old recipe of time, science, and nature. She is awestruck by the profundity of the natural world, created by chance chemical reaction. The tide has been doing the same thing every day since it came into existence, and she finds comfort in that reliability as she listens to the surf at night from her open bedroom window. She is hopeful about our future, and her work implores us to slow down and think, resist the urge to panic, and find a way through science and culture change to heal and mitigate our impact on the planet.
Like the British and U.S. land artists of the 60s and 70s, Conklin’s art practice includes working in the field making marks directly on the land and using raw materials of the earth in her studio work. Their spiritual yearnings concerning the planet Earth as home to humanity is felt in Conklin’s work as well.
ABOUT THE ARTIST: Conklin is the co-author and illustrator of The Atlas of Disappearing Places: Coasts and Oceans in a Time of Climate Change (The New Press, 2021) using an ink-on-dried seaweed process. She received her BA cum laude in religious studies and studio art from Middlebury College, followed by a Thomas B. Watson Fellowship to study the Gaelic language and culture in Scotland. There she worked with local activists and artists, documenting the traditions of an ancient culture struggling to adapt to modernity. Conklin received her MFA from California College of the Arts where she focused on textiles and sculpture. Conklin lives in Half Moon Bay and works in Pacifica.
ABOUT THE GALLERY: M. Stark Gallery opened January 2023 in a newly remodeled 120-year-old building located in the historic downtown district of Half Moon Bay. The gallery features artists whose work evokes the spirit of the West Coast and is in dialogue with contemporary fine art movements. Also in the building is the Stark-Perry Coastside Artists Retreat, an invitational residency program for journalists and artists of all disciplines. For a list of things to do while visiting Half Moon Bay, go to mstarkgallery.com/visitHMB. For more information about the gallery, go to mstarkgallery.com/press.
Event Links
Website: https://go.evvnt.com/1612997-0
