New England Diary

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Pictures of the shifting

Left: "Fragnet” (oil and graphite powder on canvas), by Kathline Carr; right: “Crane Beach” (photo), by Vicki McKenna, in their show together “Geographies of a Shifting World,’’ at Fountain Street Fine Art, Boston, through Oct. 25

The gallery says:

The two “share an interest in elemental landforms and geological processes. Carr’s drawings, paintings, and monotypes are in conversation with McKenna’s photography-based prints. They implicitly share an interest in human interaction with the natural world. Their current work has a common focus of climate change. Carr utilizes multiples and repetitious mark-making allowing patterns, gestures, and forms to represent her feelings of despair and hopelessness about current climate. McKenna’s photo illustrations combine multiple images intended to collapse present and future into one image that suggests the result of sea-level rise.’’

Panorama of Crane Beach in September 2007

— Photo by Thomas Steiner

Crane Beach is a gorgeous 1,234-acre state-owned conservation and recreation property in Ipswich, Mass., just north of Cape Ann. It has a four-mile-long sandy beachfront, dunes and a maritime pitch pine forest. Five and a half miles of hiking trails through the dunes and forest are accessible from the beachfront.

The land was given by the Crane family, whose fortune was from plumbing supplies. (One of the family bought my great-great grandfather’s house in Woods Hole, on Cape Cod. — Robert Whitcomb.)