subMerge: An Oceanic Adventure

Postponed from September 13.

My mission as an ocean activist, artist and caring nerd extraordinaire is to cultivate wonder and awe for that which goes relatively unseen and unknown, and to foster stewardship for the great blue ocean that sustains all of our lives. Water is on our minds, in so many ways, from quenching our thirsts to climate induced floods. These underwater paintings and sculptures celebrate the symbiotic life covering 70% of our blue planet. The life that gives us life.

Krisanne Baker, ecological artist and educator, presents a lunchtime talk on her process and works, which will be in solo exhibition in the Wells Reserve's Coastal Ecology Center gallery during her residency from September 1 through October 13, 2023. Krisanne's art includes underwater intertidal images, a glass 'mutating' plankton installation, and paintings inspired by microscope plankton gazing and NASA and NOAA satellite imagery.

About the Artist

Krisanne Baker is an ocean advocacy artist residing in Midcoast Maine whose sci/art concerns water quality (especially climate change induced acidification), water availability, the rights of water and its inhabitants. Baker is a naturalist at heart. Her work culminates from the practice of observing from nature combined with her research as a citizen scientist, along with collaborations with scientists. Specifically she loves to snorkel and then make art based upon her experiences below the oceans surface.

My painting process is a bit different from conventional painting as I first get inspired by being underwater. I snorkel and film, mostly in Friendship, or wherever I can get a remote ocean residency. Water samples are taken from these sites and examined under a microscope. I also volunteer as a first alert water quality sampler for the Maine Department of Marine Resources to help prevent paralytic shellfish poisoning. After producing drawings of the microscopic life, I add their images into paintings of the underwater scenes I spent time hovering in and studying. I am a voice for the ocean.

Baker bares the beauty of our critical interconnectedness and precarious balance we share with the oceans. Her multimedia installations and paintings are studies of patterns of the natural world, symbiotic arrangements of ocean life (such as in her Guardians of the Reef series) and in her Gulf of Maine macroscopic and microscopic views of our heart and lungs of the planet.

Krisanne is a former art educator at UMaine Farmington and Medomak Valley High School, where she developed the award-winning art + science curriculum Gulf of Maine: Dare to Care.