33 x 70 x 4 inches (about 6 feet tall)
This artwork incorporates creek water, mud, shells, waste paper, brick dust, and charcoal (which began as a decomposing log in Strawberry Canyon) along with watercolor, gouache, and Japanese ink
Inspired by months of collaborative fieldwork, this relief collage offers a mirror of Strawberry Creek as a living body of memory, intelligence, and wisdom.
This piece is for sale and seeking a home in or near its watershed in the East Bay!
Fill out this short Artwork Interest Form or send me an email to learn more.
Many thanks to Bioneers for supporting this project!
Continue scrolling to explore the making of this piece, and a living history of Strawberry Creek...
Strawberry Creek — a living history...
Fed by fog, rain, seeps and springs, and the porous rock of an ancient caldera, Strawberry Creek flows through the unceded homelands of Chochenyo-speaking Lisjan (Ohlone) people in xučyun (Berkeley), nourishing colorful interspecies life along its banks.
Fed by fog, rain, seeps and springs, and the porous rock of an ancient caldera, Strawberry Creek flows through the unceded homelands of Chochenyo-speaking Lisjan (Ohlone) people in xučyun (Berkeley), nourishing colorful interspecies life along its banks.
Salmon once swam through its waters. Grizzlies ambled along its redwood-studded banks. The Lisjan people, woven inextricably into the life of the creek, harvested - then and now - acorns, seeds, and shellfish. Strawberry Creek met the water of the Bay at a vast marsh teeming with shorebirds and alive with intertidal life.
But colonial settlement severely impacted the creek. Beginning in the late 1800s, cattle overgrazing in hills that are the creek’s headwaters created erosion downstream. The upper creek was tapped as a water supply by settlers, while the lower creek became the city's main sewage channel. The biodiverse tidal marshland at mouth of Strawberry Creek became an unregulated dump for many decades. Starting in 1883, Strawberry Creek was culverted underground for more than half of its length (over a mile beneath the city) displacing riparian kin from its banks and silencing the polyphonic conversation along its creekbed.
But Strawberry Creek sings!
My fieldwork and research introduced me to countless friends of, and advocates for the creek. Strawberry Creek Park — the country's first urban creek daylighting project — offers a blueprint for resurfacing buried creeks. And the rematriated (returned to its Indigenous stewards through the incredible work of Sogorea Te' Land Trust and many allies) West Berkeley Shellmound will soon welcome Strawberry Creek back to the surface, and into ceremony.
Strawberry Creek has resisted severe pollution, forced submersion, colonial incursion, and urban development. Yet the water — then, still, now — offers generously to who visit it.
Creeks, rivers, and springs have long been sites of counsel between humans and the more-than-human world. How might we include waterbodies as essential voices in our activism and change-making?
My fieldwork and research introduced me to countless friends of, and advocates for the creek. Strawberry Creek Park — the country's first urban creek daylighting project — offers a blueprint for resurfacing buried creeks. And the rematriated (returned to its Indigenous stewards through the incredible work of Sogorea Te' Land Trust and many allies) West Berkeley Shellmound will soon welcome Strawberry Creek back to the surface, and into ceremony.
Strawberry Creek has resisted severe pollution, forced submersion, colonial incursion, and urban development. Yet the water — then, still, now — offers generously to who visit it.
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Creeks, rivers, and springs have long been sites of counsel between humans and the more-than-human world. How might we include waterbodies as essential voices in our activism and change-making?