Margaret E. Murray was born and raised in the District of Columbia. She has lived in San Francisco for most of her life. Her work is inspired by travels in the Arctic and time spent near the Atlantic and Pacific.  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 and exhibits her prints and photography 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.

The etchings in Murray’s Glacial Melt series convey the grandeur of Arctic mountains and glaciers, immense, timeless forms now shifting under the pressure of a warming planet. The experimental techniques used to create the 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.