Kiera McGarvey Sears
Looking Back
Digital collage of stained/cleared larval icefish, photographs taken on camera capable microscope
Artist Background
Kiera McGarvey Sears is in her third and
final year at the College of William & Mary. She will be graduating with a self-designed major in Marine Biology and a Studio Art minor. She plans to pursue further studies in marine biology postgraduate. Currently she researches larval Antarctic fish in the Steinberg lab under Andrew Corso at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, more specifically a little known icefish species L. squamifrons.
About the Work
This piece ties together the numerical data gathered in the Western Antarctic Peninsula and the animals themselves that live in these waters. There are two layers to the image, both created out of a digital collage of larval L. squamifrons. The upper layer contains replicated images of the cleared and stained fish from the tip of the jaw to approximately midway down the body. This layer follows the graph of the winter air temperature from 1951-2017 (Henley et al.). The second layer consists of a digital conglomeration of the fins and tails of these fish and the trend of the ice season duration from 1979-2017 (Henley et al.). These larval fish were cleared and stained under the direction of Dr. Eric Hilton, with the help of Andrew Corso. These larval fish are approximately a centimeter in length and were preserved in the early 1990s.
References
Henley, S., Schofield, O., Hendry, K., et al. (2019). Variability and change in the west Antarctic Peninsula marine system: Research priorities and opportunities. Progress In Oceanography, volume number (173), 208-237. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pocean.2019.03.003