This week, I spoke with Emma Mary Murray — textile artist, place-based educator, and environmental storyteller stitching climate realities into fabric, flags, and community.
Emma joined me from Mount Desert Island, Maine, where she’s somehow managing to maintain a thriving career as an artist while teaching full-time. Her work is rooted in craft and kinship: an approach that blends personal ritual with planetary care, using slow art to tell fast-moving stories about aspects of the planet we’re losing and the one we’re still building.
In this conversation, Emma shares what it means to create climate art that isn’t just decorative but, rather, declarative. From glacier flags to embroidered landscapes to collaborative workshops, she’s turning thread into a form of truth-telling.
We talked about:
Her formative climate “aha” moment at Chewonki’s Maine Coast Semester
Her journey from outdoor guide and climber to embroidery artist
Her experience as artist-in-residence with the North Cascades Glacier Climate Project and creating “impact flags” in the field
How teaching her slow art craft is helping people reconnect with themselves and each other
How Maine’s Island Explorer bus inspired her belief in public transit as a rural climate solution
Links
Shaped By Ice art show in Seattle
Jill Pelto, climate artist and NCGCP art director
Keywords:
climate art, glacier loss, North Cascades, embroidery, storytelling, public transit, Mount Desert Island, climate education, slow craft, community art, place-based learning, youth climate action, teaching, glacial data, American Alpine Club, No Man’s Land Film Festival, climate grief, adaptation, handmade advocacy, rural climate solutions, Chewonki, activism