Poster by Emily Poole
About the Artist
Emily Poole (www.epooleart.com, @epooleart) is a natural history illustrator, raised in the Rockies and now rooted in the mossy hills of Eugene. She received her BFA in Illustration from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2016 and has created work for numerous organizations including the National Museum of Wildlife Art, Mt. Pisgah Arboretum, Sasquatch Books, and High Country News. Emily creates images with the goal of inspiring and educating about the natural world and what we can do to be better stewards of the land.
Her inspiration for the 2022 Oregon Country Fair poster came in the form of bear scat she encountered on the Fair grounds during an off-season wander. In considering the cyclical sharing of the space between human and non-human species over the course of a year, she wanted to create a design that spoke to the gifts of stewardship and renewal that all the communities on the site (plant, animal, and human) give to each other.
The design was created in 2018 with the intention of unveiling it in 2020, and the events that have passed since have transformed the concept of the poster into something more for this year- the bear bringing the Fair out of a long hibernation, returning the site to fairgoers for the first time after a period of quiet and restorative growth.
14″x22″