WHERE ART INSPIRES CONNECTION
Entropic Landscapes
featuring work by
Lisa Kairos
Margaret E. Murray
Polly Townsend
March 14 - May 3, 2026
In Entropic Landscapes, Margaret E. Murray, Polly Townsend, and Lisa Kairos examine landscapes shaped by a planet in flux. Through fractured copper plates, distilled land paintings, and layered abstractions shaped by fire, water, and shifting terrain, the exhibition presents landscape as an active system under pressure. From Arctic ice melt to desert erosion and atmospheric change, the works trace how land cracks, recedes, and reorganizes in real time.
Margaret E. Murray, Glacial Melt III, 2024
Acquatint Etching
Lisa Kairos, Ember #2, 2022
Acrylic on canvas, 40” x 40”
Lisa Kairos expands the language of landscape into abstraction. Building her paintings in layers of ink and paint, she draws on geological formations, satellite imagery, water systems, fire scars, and atmospheric transitions. Crisp interruptions in the picture plane suggest shifts in time and perspective, while areas cut away mark the ephemeral nature of our environments. Her compositions hold moments of slippage — where earth becomes sky, burn becomes ash, water overtakes land — resulting in works that feel at once measured and volatile.
Polly Townsend, Spirit Level, 2025
Oil and acrylic on panel, 12” x 16” x 3”
Polly Townsend’s paintings approach landscape as a fragile skin — pared back in palette and distilled in form. Returning obsessively to specific terrains, from Death Valley to high-altitude glaciers and remote expanses in Mongolia and Canada, she renders the land as both radiant and vulnerable. Her simplified compositions isolate modest bands of earth, inviting sustained attention. Subtle shifts in light, eroding forms, and retreating snowlines suggest environments under quiet but accelerating pressure.
Margaret E. Murray’s recent work emerges from her time in the High Arctic, where she witnessed firsthand the accelerating melt of polar ice. Her etchings translate glacial rupture into material process: copper plates fissure unpredictably, echoing calving ice sheets and the fracture lines of a warming world. Cracks, tonal shifts, and textured surfaces reflect the shifting relationship between ice and water, solidity and dissolution. The physical act of making mirrors environmental instability, embedding entropy directly into the surface of the work.
About the Artists
Lisa Kairos creates dynamic abstract landscapes to get lost in; her work is inspired by the intersection of environment, perception, beauty, and technology. A California native, Lisa received her BA in fine art from UCSC and has explored themes of western landscape in her painting practice for over 35 years. She has exhibited in group and solo shows and art fairs throughout the United States. Her work is held in many private and corporate collections, and she has completed numerous commissions for public and private spaces. She currently lives and works in Santa Cruz, CA.
Margaret E. Murray, born and raised in the District of Columbia, 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. In April 2025, Murray participated in the Arctic Circle Residency sailing in Svalbard, an archipelago of islands situated between the northernmost tip of Norway and the North Pole.
Polly Townsend (b.1977) lives and works in London. She completed an MA at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, in 2001. Townsend has travelled to some of the most remote, hostile landscapes on earth for her work, focusing on mountain, plateau, and desert regions. In 2023, she was awarded the position of Artist in Residence in Antarctica, and she has twice been selected for the National Park Artist-in-Residence schemes (to Death Valley and Badlands National Park). Townsend has exhibited widely throughout the UK and USA. In 2024, Townsend won 2nd Prize at The International Derwent Drawing Competition and was shortlisted for the Contemporary British Painting Prize.