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RiverSea Gallery presents All My Relations, an exhibition featuring original prints of Oregon coast wildlife by Duncan Berry, an Oregon printmaker, photographer, and poet who will also perform in the 2023 Fisher Poets Gathering. The show opens on Saturday, February 11, from noon to 8:00 pm during Astoria’s Artwalk, with the artist in attendance from 5:00 to 8:00 pm. The work will remain on view through March 7, 2023. 

A special event and second reception for the artist will be held at RiverSea Gallery on Saturday, February 25, from 2:30 – 4:00 during Astoria’s annual Fisher Poets Gathering. Surrounded by the All My Relations show, Berry and a cohort of fellow fisher poets, Mariah Warren, Meezie Hermansen, and Maggie Bursch, will perform their poems, sea shanties, and songs—poignant and hair-raising tales of the sea and those hunter-gatherers that venture out upon its rough waters. 

Duncan Berry considers himself and other humans as humble components of the interconnected web of life and natural elements in the surrounding environment. He makes his home in the UNESCO Biosphere Reserve at Cascade Head on the central Oregon coast. The land, sea, and sky of this hallowed place are his muse, teacher, and sanctuary. This show explores his emotional connection with a diverse and fertile range of beings from various habitats, all found within a one-mile radius of his abode. His printmaking practice is a hands-on form of reverence for the life forms he depicts so eloquently. 

Working directly from the salvaged body of a sea or land creature, a spray of foliage, or a slab of wood, Berry makes expressive composite impressions using archival inks on mulberry paper to create elegant, one-of-a-kind prints mounted on birch panels. Some of his works are in a striking combination of white ink on black Unryu paper.   

Berry has spent his life immersed in the surroundings of the Pacific Northwest coast and brings that deep connection to all his artwork. He grew up on Clatsop Plains south of Astoria and began working on his brother’s salmon troller out of the Columbia River while still a teenager, becoming captain of the boat within a few years. Later, Berry spent several decades on Vashon Island, Washington as an entrepreneur in numerous art and design businesses. Upon his return to Oregon in 2006, he formed a non-profit to protect a large swath of land near Cascade Head. In addition to printmaking and photography, he writes poems and sea shanties about his fishing experiences and his connection with the beautiful land he calls home.