King Family Bursary Winners 2026
We’re delighted to congratulate this year’s winners of the King Family Bursary!
Founded by Wally and Marilyn King, the King Family Bursary supports projects that promote understanding and appreciation of Georgian Bay’s unique environment, history, communities, and culture. This year’s recipients are:
Adam Merifield
Adam Merifield is a Toronto-based landscape photographer who spends his summers at the family cottage in Pointe au Baril on Georgian Bay. For over two decades he has explored and photographed the waters, islands, and shores of eastern and northern Georgian Bay.
Adam will use the 2026 King Family Bursary to assist in the completion of Portals into Precambria, a premium-quality coffee-table book that presents a full sweep of Georgian Bay’s eastern and northern shores. While a significant portion of the images have already been captured, this summer he will focus on previously unexplored areas, particularly between Sans Souci and Port Severn.
Portals into Precambria celebrates the Bay’s unspoiled character amid growing development pressures, while exploring our shared human longing to experience nature in its raw and timeless form.
More of Adam’s work can be seen at adammerifield.com and on Instagram @adammerifield.
Kara McIntosh & Finn O’Hara
Kara McIntosh is a painter and textile artist based in Collingwood. She brings a sustained engagement with place, light, and the felt experience of landscape to her practice, translating the rhythms and patterns of the natural world into abstracted, layered paintings. Finn O'Hara is an award-winning photographer based in Toronto with a long-term practice exploring the Canadian landscape, particularly Georgian Bay. Through his photography, O'Hara explores the beauty and complexity of our relationship with nature, working primarily at night, using laser and LED lighting to reveal the Bay's terrain after dark, creating images that sit between document and vision.
Together, McIntosh and O'Hara will explore Eastern Georgian Bay and the North Channel by boat and shoreline, working across the threshold of day and night. They will paint and photograph the same spaces, McIntosh responding in daylight, producing entirely new paintings that translate what they encounter into layered visual language, and O'Hara photographing the landscape after dark as the Bay comes alive under the stars. The intention is that the two bodies of work speak to each other without repeating each other, each entirely new and distinct from their existing practices.
Their project is built on exchange, between two distinct practices, between night and day, and between the artists and the communities whose knowledge and relationships with the Bay shape the land itself. Their approach to gathering local knowledge begins with direct, personal outreach, building a call list of storytellers, fishers, cottagers, First Nations knowledge holders, and year-round residents.
You can see Kara McIntosh's work at karamcintosh.com and on Instagram @karamcintoshstudio. You can see Finn O'Hara's work at finnohara.com and on Instagram @finnohara.
