CHRISTINA CONKLIN

“Made with ink and algae, Christina Conklin’s newest works remind us of what is possible when we create in collaboration with our environment. Together, the mystical qualities of the ink and the luminosity of the algae map familiar, yet ethereal, landscapes that seem formed with the elements—water, fire, wind.”
-Glori Simmons, Thacher Gallery, University of San Francisco

Christina Conklin's dye-infused seaweed prints have a rich archetypal quality, with individual images suggesting fire, water, roots, and land, collectively evoking destruction, creation, and impermanence. The inky, fluid images call to mind the notion of an original substance from which all life emerges. Conklin beautifully weaves her spiritual values and environmental concerns into her process and materials. By using seaweed she has harvested herself and natural plant-based dyes in an innovative printing process that incorporates chance, her work embodies themes of interdependence, care, and opening to what is.
-Suzanne L'Heureux, Interface Projects

“Conklin’s method of pressing dye-infused seaweed onto watercolor paper leaves a gorgeous, unpredictable mark. Seaweed, such an elemental life form of our endangered oceans, and plant-based dyes, from our equally endangered earth, coalesce through her artistic intentions. Her allowance for randomness and serendipity fuses into stunning art.”
-William Laven, fine art photographer/co-founder, Potrero Nuevo Farm

Conklin makes maps of life. Her images permit the beauty of landscapes and beings to inhabit two dimensional space according to a cartography that is at once rigorous and feral. She makes art about the world that is worthy of it and concerned with the business of keeping it alive.
-John W. Reid, Co-author of Ever Green: Saving Big Forests to Save the Planet

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 persuades 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.

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, CA.