I have been a practising artist/printmaker since finishing my postgraduate studies at St Martin’s College of Art and became one of the founding members of Aberystwyth Printmakers in 1979. Specialising in abstract and figurative relief prints of landscapes, I have exhibited and undertaken residences worldwide, actively promoting printmaking through teaching in schools, further and higher education in the UK and overseas, academic publishing, exhibition development and curation, and more widely as an advocate of printmaking for lifelong learning.  In recognition of my contributions to printmaking nationally and internationally I have been awarded honorary creative fellowships at both University of Lincoln UK and La Trobe University Australia.  Ten years ago, as a direct response to my own early awakening of climate and planetary crises, I decided to develop a portfolio of work centred on the theme of the watery realm where most of humanity will directly experience dangerous climate change. I have purposefully explored this topic from an interdisciplinary art-science perspective working with archaeologists investigating the first farmers in Romania; historians documenting the environmental and cultural impacts of the gold rush in Australia; ecologists studying the destruction of river habitats in New Zealand by deforestation; developing the concept of “MyRiver” with creative writers in New Zealand and the UK following catastrophic flooding in the Whanganui River in 2015 and in Lincolnshire in 2019, respectively; and most recently exploring the impacts of rapid sea-level rise on deep time human migration in Cardigan Bay, Wales.

 

Macklin, J.E. and Macklin, M.G. (2019) Art-geoscience encounters and entanglements in the watery realm. Journal of Maps, 15(3), 9-18.

 

Macklin, J.E. and Macklin, M.G. (2021) I am the River, the River is me: Deep Time Reflections on Water and Planetary Health. IMPACT Printmaking Journal, 16-16.