Cynthia Camlin’s work in painting and drawing explores environmental change through metaphor and abstracted forms. “Swamp Garden” is a new series of paintings that interweave environmental imagery with social and political history.
Camlin has frequently used underwater scenes to denote the phenomenon of out-of-sight-out-of-mind. “Boneyard” and “Bloom” series (2017-18), responded to dying coral reef systems, while several earlier bodies of work depicted marine ice as unstable architectures undermined by melt and movement. "Waterland" (2015), "Divided Earth" (2014) and "Cracked Prospects" (2013), depict a marine glacier that is dividing and cracking. Widely exhibited, this work was featured in New American Painting in 2013, the New American Painting Blog in 2014, and was nominated for the 2013 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Award and the 2015 Contemporary Northwest Art Awards, Portland Art Museum.“ Glacial Speed” was a related project of 80 hand-painted prints and video that was shown at Northwest Biennial (2012) at the Tacoma Art Museum. Camlin is professor of painting and drawing at Western Washington University. Her courses expanding the normal pedagogy of painting/drawing include Art and Ecology and Figure and Symbol.