On the sunny afternoon of Sunday, Sept. 29, Oregon City artist Quire hosted a foraging walk at Water Board Park, high above the Willamette. Her most recent series of works features historical buildings of Oregon City overlayed on paintings that depict the ecosystem in a pre-colonial state.
As Quire introduced herself as an amateur forager and verified that all participants would not hold her liable for eating the wrong thing out of the underbrush, she was orbited by her child and the child’s friend, who giggled and dragged a large stick around the parking lot. The audience of the walk consisted of myself, a local artist, both children, Quire’s dog led by her brother and the mother of the second child.
We were introduced to a number of local plants, their properties, seasons and methods of identification. Quire noted a cyclical relationship between painting these plants and learning to identify their details. Queen Anne’s Lace, for example, has tiny hairs on its stems and a black spot in its flowers which can be used to distinguish it from a similar but much less edible counterpart, poison hemlock. Quire talked about a difficult, precise method to pick a stinging nettle leaf without being hurt and distinguished between Himalayan and trailing blackberries by their leaf patterns. We learned that a plantain poultice — leaves chewed into a paste and spread on skin — can help with an insect bite, but a nettle sting should be treated with a dock poultice. Every now and then, Quire’s own child would join in with an identification tip, eager to announce the name of a new plant before running away again to play.
After the walk, Quire led a small caravan of cars to her studio, which is a bright second-story room of the First Baptist Church of Oregon City, just off the building’s gymnasium. Quire’s current series features paintings in gouache and watercolor on Aquaboard.
“I am traditionally a mixed-media artist … but when I had a child, I needed something more accessible and easy to clean up, so I just started watercoloring,” Quire said.
After getting the idea for this series, which is partially inspired by a map she saw of Portland’s metropolitan area as its hypothetical natural ecosystems, Quire began a series of landscape paintings.
“Those are all taken from photographs I’ve taken while just adventuring places,” Quire said.
Quire layers her digital drawings of historical buildings, which are etched into plexiglass, on top of landscape paintings that depict a pre-colonial Oregon. The final piece gives the impression that the translucent ghost of a building is obscuring a rich, full-color natural scene.
Quire’s work does not juxtapose untouched wilderness with human impact, but rather focuses on land as it may have been originally used and inhabited before colonization.
“There’s a path through here indicating human presence, and this would be their field that they would tend to every year,” Quire said, gesturing to the landscape sitting behind an etching of a multi-story house.
With each piece she presented, Quire would note the work’s plants and how they might have been used by Indigenous people prior to colonization.
“I expected to encounter a lot of ‘Sorry I’m a white person, sorry we did this to you,’” said Quire. “But, Indigenous people and climate activists and historians mostly have a view that we are now all victims of colonization, we are in the same boat together. If this earth dies, we all die, so it is not ‘us and them.’”
She noted how Oregonians’ pride in pioneer heritage can lead to polarizing views, citing an imagined exemplary pioneer relative.
“Great-grandpa Jed built a beautiful building and civilization and whatever, and also this is what was here, too. And this is just as valid and just and good. And one doesn’t cancel out the other,” she said.
Quire’s work explores what was here, what is here now and what has been removed.
“Those types of questions are what helps us stop perpetuating those mistakes: thinking we’re doing good because of what we believe in at the time, but really we’re hurting other people,” she concluded.
Quire’s full series of nine similarly juxtaposed landscape and architectural pieces will be showing starting Dec. 7 at the Imperfecta Gallery in Oregon City.
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