Meet Artist Shani McLane

Maize (2018), serigraphy on fabric by the yard.

Barley (2018), serigraphy on fabric by the yard.

Tomato (2018), serigraphy on fabric by the yard.

Cellular Compositions (2013), 18″H x 18″W, serigraphy on fused glass.

Lilac Silhouettes (2024), 34″H x 20″W, serigraphy on fused glass.

Shani McLane at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Shani McLane appreciates seeds. So much so that during the summer solstice of 2015, a time of year when the sun never really sets over the Arctic Ocean, she joined twenty other artists aboard a wooden ship sailing through the chilly, iceberg-cluttered waters of an archipelago north of mainland Norway so that she could visit the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. This underground bunker was built to save a copy of every crop seed on Earth, should a catastrophe destroy them. And the irony, McLane says, is that because of global warming, the permafrost around the seed vault is now melting.

McLane had been concerned about climate change—and interested in seeds—for some time, but this voyage was particularly emotional for her. She watched a polar bear and her cubs, yellow against the dunes of white snow, eat a reindeer. “They’re supposed to be eating seals,” she says, but because of ice melt they can no longer reach the seals. “To see that untouched world, and how our actions are affecting it, was breathtaking.”

McLane started out as a printmaker, but after running the printmaking studio at the Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, Washington, made famous by glass artist Dale Chihuly, she began to transfer her designs onto glass and fabric. Today she makes boldly colored images inspired by plants and seeds in whatever medium her inspiration commands.

Recently she honored her own New Hampshire flower garden by making what she calls “glass flowers.” These are not like the 3D models you may have seen at the Harvard Museum of Natural History; they are graphic floral shapes she screens onto flat glass and fuses in a kiln a total of three times. By adjusting the temperature, McLane builds up a separate layer from each firing, which gives the work texture, depth, and the feeling of being right at the level of the plants, the soil, and the seeds.

“It all stems from seeds,” McLane says. “Food, plants, even people, when you think about it. Seeds are the root of all life.”

Editor’s note: To see more of Shani McLane’s work, visit her studio in Ashland, N.H. (by appointment), or shanimclane.com.