Bloom

Keith Prue is a substantially self-taught artist, often presenting multiple adjacent images in a frame, for visual impact or to draw contextual comparison. From living and working on four continents and visiting more than fifty countries, he explores and contrasts cultural nuances. Exhibiting online and showing in group exhibitions, his photographs are held in private collections in the USA and elsewhere. He is an Elected Artist Member of Art League RI, and an Exhibiting Member of the RI Center for Photographic Arts.

Suzanna (Suzi) Clark is a recent graduate of the MIT-Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Joint Program, where she researched Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs), also known as red tides. HABs are the rapid growth of microscopic algae, which can sometimes be toxic to humans or threatening to other marine life. Suzi’s research focused on trying to explain these blooms through a variety of techniques, including collecting bottles of ocean water and running complex computer models. She is particularly interested in the human-science interface, which is why she was drawn to this project that is motivated by connecting the oceans and human health. She has recently moved away from the ocean but continues to work at the human-science interface, helping Minnesotans to adapt to climate change.

Drifters

Kathy Hodge attended RISD and has a BFA in painting from Swain School of Design. She has  long taken inspiration from the natural world, exhibiting her work in many one person shows. She was appointed Artist in Residence in thirteen of our National Parks and Forests, most recently in Denali National Park, and was awarded the Fellowship in Painting from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts in 2017. She is an Elected Artist Member of the Art League RI. 

She is excited to be part of the Synergy II project, and hopes to have viewers become intrigued with what they might now know about ocean life, and how the creatures we may never see — the ‘drifters’ — are the basis of life as we know it, on so many levels.  

Chrissy Hernandez joined the Synergy II project while pursuing her PhD at WHOI, which she successfully completed in October 2020. Her thesis work focused on the distribution, growth, and transport of larval (baby) fishes in the ocean, with a particular focus on larval tunas. When they hatch, these tiny fish do not even have fins yet, and, combined with their small size, this means that they are not very good at swimming. Chrissy studies field-collected samples of these fish to understand where and when they are most abundant, and extracts their tiny “ear-bones” or “otoliths” to investigate their age (in days) and growth. This work is important for understanding the population dynamics of these species, particularly when we are deciding how to manage harvested and protected populations. Fish produce millions of eggs each year, and less than 1% of these offspring will survive to 1 year of age-- this means that tiny changes in the survival of the earliest life stages can have a big impact on how many fish we can catch a few years down the line!

Oceans of Time

Marcy Cohen studied art and photography at the School of Visual Arts, the International Center of Photography and Maine Media. She is an Elected Artist of the Art League RI, Exhibiting Member of the Rhode Island Center for Photographic Arts, Praxis Gallery and the Colorado Photographic Arts Center. Her photographs have been exhibited in galleries nationally and internationally and online on Artsy and online publications such as F-Stop and the Curated Fridge. Later this year her work will be exhibited in the Seventh Edition of Eyes on Main Street and Tales of the Unwritten during the Trieste Photo Days. Marcy also serves as a member of the Board of Directors of the Cue Art Foundation, a not-for-profit contemporary art space in New York City dedicated to creating career and educational opportunities for emerging artists. She is also an attorney licensed to practice law in the State of New York and currently serves as Chief Legal Officer for ING Americas.

Sujata Murty is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences at the University at Albany. Her research focuses on understanding past changes in climate and ocean systems to improve our ability to anticipate future changes in a warming world. To do so, she synthesizes observations, climate, and ocean model simulations, and geochemical data from climate archives including corals from the Indian and Pacific Ocean regions and tree rings from Southeast Asia. Overall, Sujata aims to fill in the gap in documenting human-induced climate change that existing instrumental climate records cannot resolve. She is also passionate about finding creative ways to more broadly communicate her research and the impacts of climate change through art-science collaborations.

The photographs in this series, Oceans of Time, are composites that include elements from Sujata’s dives in the Indonesian Seas and Pacific Ocean, layered in a colorful, dreamlike melody with other images of time and the underwater world. Corals are known for longevity. An individual coral can in certain cases grow continuously for hundreds of years at a time, acting as a meteorological weather station in the ocean that records changes in climate and environmental conditions. Art and science generally operate in separate silos. We believe creating more synergy between art and science will instill greater understanding allowing scientists to reach broader audiences and instill wide-ranging intellectual and emotional connections to their work. Our intent is to create work that displays an optimistic future realized through a constructive collaboration between science and the forces of nature.

Submesoscale soup

Janine Wong is a designer and artist who received her MFA from Yale School of Art. She researches color and hybrid print processes combining both traditional techniques and digital technologies. She explores the intersections between design, printmaking and book arts and employs the results of this research in her own artist books, prints, and collages. Janine’s current research is in color theory, looking at the history of color theory and bringing past concepts to current practice. 

Jing He is a scientist and PhD candidate at MIT and the Wood Hole Oceanographic Institution where she studies physical oceanography to better understand the ocean’s role in climate change. She researches how ocean currents in “submesoscale soup” transport nutrients to support life in the ocean and helps the ocean sequester carbon dioxide. To do this, she employs a range of tools ranging from making direct measurements off research ships, to running numerical ocean simulations on computers, and utilizing machine learning to find patterns in large data sets. 

This collaboration showcases the beauty of the rich and unseen ocean physics that is central to Jing’s research in an engaging and accessible way. In this artist’s book, Jing and Janine use cooking analogies to break down a complex “submesoscale soup” of currents down into its essential ingredients and steps, with each step beautifully illustrated with marbling to help readers imagine how different physical phenomena combine to create the complex ocean.

Forms of Every Breath You Take

Saberah Malik is an accomplished visual artist with expertise in textiles who teamed up with Max Jahns, a Ph.D. candidate in oceanography at the MIT-WHOI Joint Program who studies the interactions between living things in the marine environment, and their importance for the health of our planet. “Forms of Every Breath You Take” showcases the awe-inspiring forms, and the unsung importance of phytoplankton in the world’s oceans. In many ways, these creatures are the lungs of our planet, producing over 50% of the world’s oxygen. “Forms of Every Breath You Take” aims to celebrate these life-sustaining heroes of the microbial world. Our project addresses morphology, which is the study of form and function. The project’s use of transparent, flowing fabrics and luminescent dyes illustrates the most important aspects of phytoplankton morphology - light, color, and configuration- which have been refined over billions of years. The creatures you see before you are all made entirely of fabric but are representations of real microscopic organisms you could find in any drop of water, all of which are responsible for life as we know it today.