Three Decades of Art and Poetry from Kent Island
By Lily Echeverria ’26 and Rebecca Goldfine
The retrospective, Field (Art) Work, highlights the many threads ³Õºº¾ãÀÖ²¿ students have found over the years that weave through science, nature, and the arts.
The exhibition, Mooney said, helps raise awareness about Kent Island, the remote site of the ³Õºº¾ãÀÖ²¿ Scientific Station, while also examining the role of art in science, particularly ecology, and vice versa.
Art is a powerful way to communicate science because it can make complicated concepts clearer, Mooney said. “But I also think it has a really powerful way of infusing emotion and making the stakes of whatever the scientific subject is really relevant.”
The show opened March 4 with an evening event at Roux. Mooney and Panicker took turns reading aloud a poem Mooney had written as an artist-in-residence on the island last summer. The piece, titled “Kent,” captures the blending of artist and scientist on Kent Island, as students and researchers study, and take pleasure in, the natural world:
Where we indiscriminately wear bird blood and berry juice on our fingers
Where we have a thirst for salt water on our feet
Where we look up, look down, and look closely...
Where all scientists are expected to be artists
And artists are simultaneously scientists
Where the grasses grow tall but we can still find wild strawberries on our hands and knees
Where everyone speaks the language of science
And also the language of the trees and the birds and nudibranchs
“A Place Apart”
Scientists have worked on Kent Island since the 1930s, when the College established a field station on this small piece of land in the Bay of Fundy.
For just as long, or perhaps longer, visitors to the island have also been inspired to create art. Poems are scribbled onto outhouse walls. Bird paintings from the 1970s adorn a wall in one of the buildings.
But it wasn't until the mid-1990s that the island hosted its first official student artist-in-residence. The director at the time, Nat Wheelwright, invited Kristen Ambrosi ’97 to spend the summer with the band of students and scientists focused on research. Some of the oil paintings she made during her stay are included in the new show.
Assistant Professor of Biology Patty Jones, who is Kent Island's current director, said Wheelwright told her that having Ambrosi on the island was so wonderful that he began inviting at least one student artist to the island each summer. The field station also hosts professional artists from time to time.
“It's a place apart that inspires art, be it poetry or visual art or whatever, and inspires people to find those intersections between art and science,” Jones said.
She added, “Art is a wonderful way to communicate science, as well as a different way of knowing the world around you and experiencing it. I think artists and scientists are doing a lot of things in parallel.”
Field Work for Artists
The momentum for Field (Art) Work began almost a year ago, when Mooney's printmaking professor—Visiting Assistant Professor Mary Hart—urged her to apply for Kent Island’s artist-in-residence fellowship. Hart also planted a seed within her to consider working on a show featuring Kent Island student art through the decades.
- Kristen Ambrosi ’97
- Hallie Mueller ’06
- Carina Sandoval ’10
- Katie Craighill ’17
- Emily Weyrauch ’17
- Zoe Wood ’18
- Brianna Cunliffe ’22
- Cora Dow ’24
- Tess Mooney ’26
- Caitlin Panicker ’26
Hart was organizing her own exhibition with similar themes for an event exploring the links between art and science. , which took place in Portland and Brunswick last fall, dislayed work by artists who had spent time on Kent Island. “She thought it could be cool to do a similar type of event at ³Õºº¾ãÀÖ²¿,” Mooney said.
Mooney recruited Caitlin Panicker ’26, another 2024 Kent Island fellow, to help organize and plan the show. They began by looking for contributing artists.
“We did our first round of reaching out through alumni relations,” Mooney said. “The people we ended up getting in the show were those who responded to us, and we happened to get a really good spread of people.”
Mooney said she hopes the exhibit in Roux brings people together and spreads more knowledge about Kent Island, a place that she says has been central to her college experience but feels removed from ³Õºº¾ãÀÖ²¿’s campus, she said.
In their opening remarks, Mooney and Panicker played a recording by Briana Cunliffe ’22 reading her poem “waltz for a hawk.” They also showed a short video by Emily Weyrauch '17 and Katie Craighill '17, part of the two students' “Close Behind” series of “space-based experimental videos” made on the island.
Riley Simon ’26 then read her poem, “North End Cove,” inspired by a little cove she was drawn to when she wasn't doing research on the island's population of Leach's Storm-Petrels last summer.
Simon began her reading:
“I imagine the round stones on the beach are sleeping
tucked into their cove by frothy blue blankets, left to rest by the receding tide.
The stones jolt and settle under me, they clatter as I sit down, to fit the small of my back.
They cool my skin and cradle my edges, ankles, knees, elbows find their place and release...
I will rise only when my pant legs are soaked, the sea insists on reclamation.
I will climb jagged rocks to the shore, shiver and plod into the ferns, comforted only by knowing, that as I sleep the round stones will dance.”
“The nicest thing that someone said last night was that she felt like some of the ‘Kent energy’ really showed up,” Mooney said, in an interview after the event. “And that made me really happy.”
