09/26 Featured Artist: Emily Horton

As individuals our settings are unique and focused but our relationships between them are many and complex. Emily Horton’s life story and work reveal a truly remarkable diversity of experience and self-expression with an accompanying effort to simplify, clarify and distill in this Place. Emily’s creative practice reflects her unique cultural background and experience, her academic research in anthropology, her travel and living in South America, and her employment and volunteering in environmental organizations. This work includes music performance and songwriting, as well as photography, music, graphic design, and pottery.

Her artwork is integrated into a web of connections that is fundamentally based on relationships and place. Extracting the work and placing it on a wall devoid of context may just miss the point of its making and alienate its impulse which is to bring together and express profoundly our interconnectedness and sense of place. Yes, life is complex, but at bottom its beauty and expression can and should be simple, honest and true. This may sound like haiku by another name. In this case, the Place we are talking about is Guemes Island where Emily, her husband, and their kiddo have established a new home in the past several years.

Drawn to the beauty of the Salish Sea and the region’s diverse socio-ecological communities, they discovered their new place to be a site in the Hideaway. Life on Guemes began in a trailer with Emily working remotely for the US Fish and Wildlife Service’s International Affairs Program; her husband helped manage the Hideaway’s water system after taking a sabbatical from teaching middle school. While the trailer has now been replaced by an open, bright and airy house, the land and community they fell in love with remains.

Embarking on a new professional journey, Emily recently launched her business UMIZEN. This term draws inspiration from Emily's matrilineal heritage and the Japanese words: umi (sea), mitsu (honey) and shizen (nature), in other words, a sweet meditation honoring sea, land, and our interconnectedness with nature and each other. UMIZEN brings together nature-inspired creations, connecting culinary experiences, and conservation consulting services to promote socioecological inter-wellbeing through celebrating and caring for the planet’s biocultural diversity and communities of life.

Currently Emily is focusing on developing two distinct bodies of artwork: Shizen Taku (sumi-ink prints) and nature-inspired photography. Both are inspired by the Salish Sea, informed by Japanese aesthetics and shaped by influences from across North and South America. This blending of East and West reflects Emily’s Alabama roots, Japanese-American heritage, time spent in Paraguay and Brazil, as well as her love for biological and cultural diversity. Indeed, her care for biocultural diversity led her to obtain a PhD in environmental cultural anthropology, which seeks to understand human-environment relationships through the lens of culture.

Shizen Taku, meaning “nature impression” in Japanese, is an artisanal print-making practice developed by Emily. Each print is attentively crafted by hand. The guiding principles of this technique are a sense of place, seasonality and cycles, impermanence, interbeing, presence, and kanso (the Japanese aesthetic of simplicity). This technique begins with a meditative walk through the forest or along the sea, mindfully gathering elements such as a young fern frond or a weathered shell while offering gratitude to the earth and the sea and honoring our interdependence with them. Sumi-ink impressions are then made of these elements. Emily invites us to experiment with contemplative creative practices seeking reciprocity with nature, each other, and this place.

 Emily’s nature-inspired photography grew out of college coursework and professional experience working as a photojournalist and partnering with an environmental nonprofit in Paraguay, Guyra Paraguay, to publish a bilingual educational photography book. Her Salish Sea photographs also begin with a meditative walk. Terrestrial elements are sometimes paired with marine ones, reminding us of the interconnectedness —and the artificial divide placed— between ocean and land. In addition to art, food offers a key pathway to advancing the community-environmental mission of UMIZEN.

Place-based relationships with local foods connect ecological health, cultural identity, and human wellbeing. This culinary focus allows Emily to draw on her passion for local food systems, informed by her doctoral research, to advance actionable, on-the-ground efforts. Currently, she is collaborating with community members to create a Guemes Island Food and Farm Map. The map’s purpose is to help people share and discover food and agricultural resources across the island. More broadly, the project aims to celebrate and support sustainable local food systems and community wellbeing. Volunteers welcome! For more info email: guemesislandfoodways@gmail.com.

Emily’s commitment to people and the planet is matched by participation in organizations that work to that end. She invites people to familiarize themselves with the Salish Sea Alliance and the Northwest Straits Commission. She serves on the board for the Alliance and the Science Advisory Committee for the Commission, collaborating with others to steward and restore the health of the Salish Sea.

To learn more about Emily and her latest projects and artwork visit: https://umizen.weebly.com/. If interested in her artwork, collaborative food projects, or conservation consulting services, please contact Emily by email (umizen.connect@gmail.com) or phone (206 696-3903). She will also have artwork for sale during the Dec. 5, 2026 Guemes Island Art Market and Studio Tour, which is organized by the Guemes Island Art Initiative.

Written by Emily Horton and Ralph Mendershausen