Emily Jung Miller
Wonder Windows at Hagg Lake
Posted on · Categories Exhibits, Sculpture
For the past six months, I’ve been researching, exploring, and illustrating the ecosystems at Scoggins Valley Park, where the Hagg Lake reservoir was created in 1975. It’s close to my home in Forest Grove. Diving in to the relationships between dozens of species that thrive at the lake has given me a deeper understanding of my own backyard. Click here to see all 18 Wonder Windows. And continue reading below for my experience creating this major public art project!
Table of Contents
Listening
Being by the water is where I find peace. I started this project by visiting a few of the 18 proposed artwork sites around the lake with curiosity and a notebook, wandering and listening and sitting quietly, taking photos of small details, watching the water framed by the trees. Wind in tall evergreens sounds different than wind in the maples. I heard songbirds at some sites, and not at others. I tried to describe the places they were, and were not. Mostly I couldn’t see the songbirds, only hear them. It was the bigger birds that showed themselves: Jays, Crows, Ospreys, Eagles.
I visited on cold rainy days where the fog lay low on the curves of the road, and hot bright days where I moved directly from one shady spot to the next. Sometimes I visited alone and sometimes with park staff, to hear their stories about these places. Working on this community project, I wanted to learn: who uses this site? Who or what lives here? Each of our human interactions is one thread in a weaving joined by resident plants and animals also relying on each other. Our communities overlap in ways we may or may not know.
Relationships
I approached this project as a nature lover and water lover, with an open mind about how I would respond to each site. In showing up, listening, and researching, I was drawn in to the relationships between specific plants and animals at each ecosystem around the lake. With 18 sites to cover, there were many different types of landscape, and each place has its own network of life.
In meadowlands, I learned about the role of the Oregon White Oak and Indigenous fire management practices that kept prairie landscapes thriving for thousands of years. In this landscape, the Fender’s Blue Butterfly relies on Kincaid Lupine for its caterpillar stage of life. As these lupines became rarer with the modern disappearance of prairie habitat, the Fender’s Blue Butterfly also disappeared. Over the past few years, modern conservationists have brought back these two endangered native species back from near extinction. By re-planting Kincaid Lupine, the butterflies have returned. Nectar that sustains adult butterflies has also been increased through the re-planting of native meadow wildflowers like Camas, Checkermallow, Narrowleaf Onion, and Oregon Sunshine.
The Fender’s Blue Butterfly was the first unique species I focused on illustrating. This was in February of 2025. It was a joy for me to focus deeply on how this butterfly was distinct and unique, studying the stripes and spots on its wing patterns, making sure the colors I used were balanced. Blue outer wings for male butterflies, coppery orange for females, with pearly gray undersides for both, and white wing edges. At the same time, I was learning about how this beautiful creature was vitally connected to its ecosystem, and how the ebb and flow of its species connected with our own actions in changing the landscape.
This sparked my curiosity to dive deeper into my original question:
Who lives here? Who uses this place?
The Wonder Windows took shape into a study of the richness at each site, the vibrancy of life around us, and including us. I centered my research on native species, which thrive together and rejuvenate the landscape where they are deeply connected. I also included non-native, human-introduced species with intention. In marshlands, I studied the many different waterbirds that pass through on their seasonal migrations, or live here all year round. American Coots build their nest platforms in the tall reeds at the water’s edge, and often flock with other types of ducks. When I discovered their distinctly lobed feet, it was a delight to illustrate. I learned that Buffleheads are tree-nesting ducks that use the abandoned knothole nests of the Northern Flicker, a large woodpecker.
Are the nests really always abandoned, or is there sometimes an overlap and dispute? Does the Flicker naturally nest earlier in the year than the Buffleheads?
Seasons
The way life shifts through the seasons became important to the project. Most of us experience Hagg Lake in the summertime – like the Ospreys, and other warm-season visitors. I chose to also illustrate the spring flowering of fruit trees, and waterbirds with their new chicks (two for Loons, which carry their chicks on their backs, and 8 or 10 chicks for Buffleheads).
In my summer panels, I worked on illustrating the heat – tall grass baked golden, the brilliant blue of the sky reflected in the water. Summer also brings the ripening of many fruits, both native and introduced by settlers. Many fruit trees still grow from decades ago when they were planted here in the Scoggins Valley, before the damming of Scoggins Creek created Hagg Lake in 1975.
The fruit theme carries through to autumn, when the Bigleaf and Vine Maples show a rainbow of colors, and the Alders, Hazelnut, and Willow shine bright yellow, and the rains return. Winter is a quieter time, but there is plenty of life and beauty present through our cold season with its occasional exciting week of snow.
Who stays through the winter, and how do they survive?
Cedar Waxwings share the frost-sweetened blue winter berries of Mahonia (Oregon Grape) to make sure the entire flock thrives. Townsend’s Chipmunks forage for the last acorns of autumn. Bald Eagles and Coyotes remain at the water’s edge, along with Mallards and Bufflehead Ducks, when most other waterbirds have moved south. Tiny Chickadees and flocks of Dark-Eyed Juncos stay too. Each relies directly on the others to hold the weaving of the ecosystem together. Willow and Warbler, Beaver and Alder, Owl and Oak and Chipmunk. Turtle and Sunshine. They share specific alliances, cultivated over generations, which we rely on for our thriving, too.
Cycles of Change
I find peace in natural cycles, and knowing this change will come again. This concept inspired the transparency and double-sided design of the artworks. They are meant to shift. Sometimes, parts of the artwork will be less visible than others. Each Window looks different in morning or afternoon light, at sunset, on a sunny or overcast or rainy day. Seasonal changes in the landscape will change the Windows, too. The Wonder Windows frame and overlay the landscape rather than dictate or replace it. The transparency suggests a memory or a glimpse of a moment, past or future, held in the story of each place.
How does a Window with ripe Blackberries feel on a winter hike? (The bare vines are right there on the trail, waiting to return to green.) How does a Window full of schooling fish feel on a hot summer day? (Are you hoping to see those fish within minutes?)
The moon cycle has been important in my work for the past few years, and I included a full moon, crescent moon, and three-quarter moon in this project. The moon is most prominent at Hagg Lake at the edges of day, glowing against deep twilight blue sky, or a colorful sunrise or sunset. At which edge of the day have you seen it here?
I enjoyed illustrating these edges of the day – sunrise, sunset, dusk. Fishermen know these are often the best times to be out on the water. Fishing is a major draw for humans and birds at Hagg Lake, and I tried to illustrate the different aspects of this experience in several panels.
At Windows around the lake: Bass, Trout, and the smaller fish here too, like Perch and Crappie. At Dam Overlook: Humans fishing from small boats and from the banks of the lake. At C-Ramp Pier: fish swimming through the “spider block” shelter structures we created to provide more places for fish to hide, hunt, and grow. Around the lake: Cormorants, Eagles, Ospreys, and Herons watching the water for their next meal.
What is the pattern of an Osprey’s tail feathers? What is the color around a Double-Crested Cormorant’s eye?
Delight, Curiosity, and Joy
Delight, curiosity, and joy have been central themes in my community artwork over the past nine years. The double-sided artworks gave me an opportunity to play with these themes in designing different scenes on the two sides of each panel. With 18 Windows, that means 36 scenes – no wonder there are over 80 unique species featured in the project!
Visitors might pass the artwork along their path and notice its transparency, but they might not think about finding something new on the other side. (Or maybe that’s the first thing they will think of…?) Either way, these details are meant to encourage and reward looking closely and asking your own questions about how we create and share these communities with so many others.
Community
I found answers to my questions because other people gave them freely, wishing to share their experience of these places. My deepest thanks to the parks staff and visitors at Hagg Lake for the generosity of their time, as well as the fishermen, citizen scientists, and researchers who share observations and images online at iNaturalist.ca, Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, Native Plants PNW, Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s All About Birds, Oregon Bass and Panfish Club, Institute for Applied Ecology, and of course, Wikipedia alongside these other sources. I relied greatly on this public data to choose which species to include on each panel, and how to show them. My own visits were just one thread in the weaving.
Thanks to the fabricators and technicians who created the physical artworks while I managed the digital designs. I worked closely with Forest Grove metal artist Eric Canon and Portland fabricator Versa-Tech to create the custom steel frames, and with the printing team at Impact Sign in Hillsboro for the multi-layer, custom-cut artwork panels utilizing 5 different materials to achieve the different levels of transparency needed. Thanks to parks staff for thoughtfully choosing 18 artwork sites around the park, installing eighteen 140-pound, 10-foot-long steel frames in the ground, and positioning each artwork to look its best.
Wonder Windows was funded by Explore Tualatin Valley, Travel Oregon, and Washington County Parks. Thank you for your vision and support of the full scope of this project, which grew from a handful of artworks, into a park-spanning experience.
The project’s title came last, and was generously contributed by a youth in the community, as I struggled with big words like ecosystem and interdependence. “Wonder Windows – because they make you wonder.” Wonder holds both curiosity and awe, and the closer I got to these places, the more wonder I found.
The names of plants and animals are capitalized in accordance with Robin Wall Kimmerer’s gesture of acknowledgement, respect, and reciprocity towards the many species that share our world, supporting and sustaining us in ways we may or may not know. See her book The Serviceberry to learn more.
