Michel Droge is a multi-media artist whose work engages with the environment and ideas of multi-species and entangled life systems. Inspired by oceans and landscape, mapping, and environmental research, their immersive collaborations, paintings, drawings, and prints visually explore vulnerable and under-represented environmental areas to promote awareness and conservation. “Across my work, I aim to surface the aesthetic, political, and environmental implications of uncertainty. To bring mystery and wonder to the forefront and share a poetic expression of science and philosophy. By foregrounding the instability inherent in both natural systems and artistic processes, I seek to create visual spaces that invite reflection on how we perceive, inhabit, and imagine our rapidly changing world.”- Michel Droge

Michel’s Fulbright project, Light, Salt and Stone, is an interdisciplinary art and science project that will explore the coastal and oceanic landscapes of Greece and Iceland. Often in transitional geographies, new ideas, images, and discoveries emerge. Liminal places can be a fertile space where imagination thrives and a connection is made between the seen and unseen, the known and unknown; a place for exploring the poetics of liminal spaces, where land meets sea and where art and science converge. Light, Salt, and Stone is a metaphor for that space illuminated between the sea and the land, and for the fertile imaginative ground between the conscious and unconscious mind. This is the area where meditative practice, deep scientific investigation, and visual expression can come together. Through a lens of marine research at Greece’s Hellenic Centre for Marine Research in Crete and Iceland’s University of Akureyrie, they will explore how life thrives in even the most extreme conditions. Both Greece, with its deep historical and philosophical roots, sublime coastlines and island formations, and Iceland, with its glaciers, volcanic formations and extremes of light, provide contemporary evidence of our planet's extremes and those perimeters where powerful forces of generation and adaptability are evident in an evolving climate. This collaborative exchange will enable innovative approaches to communicating complex scientific information through artistic means, making science more accessible and relatable while inspiring a series of visually engaging and conceptually rich artworks that push the boundaries of abstract landscape painting and interdisciplinary art. Michel is the recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation award, a Kindling Fund grant, and three Maine Arts Commission grants. They have been awarded fellowships and residencies at the Joan Mitchell Center, MEAR, Surf Point, Ellis-Beauregard Foundation, Hewnoaks, The Tides Institute, The Joseph Fiore Foundation, The Stephen Pace House, and the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. Their work has been included in exhibitions, amongst which are The Frost Museum, Art Basel Miami, The Field Museum, The Cue Art Foundation, Bates College Art Museum, University of Maine Orono and Augusta, Institute of Contemporary Art at MECA and the Maine Jewish Museum.