Oncorhynchus: Stories of Salmon in a Changing Climate

This project represents the body of work I created for my undergraduate senior thesis at Reed College in 2016-2017. The entire project was titled The Role of Salmon in Storytelling and Place-making in the Pacific Northwest and Implications in a Changing Climate, and it explored the strong cultural symbolism, regional importance, and environmental history of salmon in the Pacific Northwest, an area where endangered and disappearing populations of salmon are being further threatened by climate change. The artwork portion, shown below, is titled Oncorhynchus: Stories of Salmon in a Changing Climate. The images themselves were created using an intaglio etching process. I used these images to illustrate a narrative of 4 “salmon stories” that I bound into handmade artist books and also printed in a zine format for wider distribution.