Margaret E. Murray is a printmaker living in San Francisco. Her work is inspired by travels in the Arctic and time spent near the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Murray holds a BA in semiotics from Brown University and a JD from the University of California Hastings College of the Law. She is an artist in residence at KALA Art Institute in Berkeley, California and exhibits her work locally and nationally. Making has been her way of life since childhood, and pressing ink into paper is a thrill hard-wired into her by her great-grandfather, a Scottish letterpress man.

My “Glacial Melt” series conveys the grandeur of mountains and glaciers — immense, timeless forms now shifting under the pressure of a warming planet. The experimental techniques I use to etch copper plates result in spontaneous and often uncontrollable fissures, mimicking the fracturing of ice sheets, glacial calving, and melt. Cracks, texture, and tone depict transformation and erosion. The process of creating each plate becomes a metaphor for the ever-changing connection between ice and water, solid and liquid states, and the cascading changes happening in the Arctic.