BREAKING THE WAVES

In the Arctic Circle, Whitley Mike ’20, MA, observes human impact on whales

As part of the three-week expedition in November 2022, Mike and the SWX team documented interactions between snorkelers and orcas during the winter herring run that may help create sustainable management strategies for the future. “It was an incredible immersion into what felt like another planet–a distant planet ruled by mountains, waves, and whales.” Photos by Emma Khan

A life-long nature lover and selfconfessed Free Willy fan, Whitley Mike knows the power of being face to face with one of the world’s great apex predators. “The first time I saw an orca in the wild was like seeing God,” she says. “They touch the soul in a way I can’t even begin to describe.”

But as “swim with the whales” tours and other immersive eco-tourism offerings take off in popularity, Mike can’t help wondering whether these programs are sustainable. To find out, Mike put her graduate degree in sustainable design into action and recently set out to Norway’s Arctic Circle with Sea Women Expeditions, an international, intergenerational, interdisciplinary, and matriarchal team studying the challenges of a warming Arctic.

As the team’s Creative Director and Co-leader of the Norway Orca Behavioural Project, Mike and her partners are studying how these close encounters affect everyone in the ecosystem, from orcas to Indigenous people. “These programs are a huge money maker in Norway, where it’s like the wild west with little regulation,” says Mike, who wrote her MCAD master’s thesis on orca conservation challenges in the Pacific Northwest. “I’m able to bring my sustainable design degree into play through a design-thinking lens, making sure we’re considering all of the stakeholders.”

Not long after arriving as an exchange student from Brighton University, Grace Easton decided to make MCAD her alma mater. “In the UK, we didn’t have much contact time with our professors, whereas at MCAD everyone is at school, in their studios the whole day,” she says. “I thought that was the absolute right way to run an art school. It’s all about showing up and being together as part of a community.”

Now based in London, where she works as a senior illustrator for Smythson of Bond Street, a British luxury leather goods brand, Easton says she still benefits from the close bonds she made with MCAD classmates. “Now that we’re all on social media, I can follow along with what all my peers are doing, and where everyone has landed,” she says. “You will find that the friends you make at art school and the connections you make there are so strong. When you’ve all been told this isn’t going to be an easy ride, it’s a real bonding experience.”

A freelance illustrator with her own children’s book coming out in 2024, Easton says emerging from the pandemic has inspired her to recommit to making a little art every day. “Drawing is the ultimate magic trick,” she says. “Keeping up a daily practice of drawing, whether you’re doing it for a client, or for yourself in a sketchbook, has been a way for me to stay in love with drawing. It’s a relationship with myself that I want to develop.”