Working from art, science, and education backgrounds, Sierra Weir is a ‘pigment practitioner’ focusing on wild pigments found near waterways in historically mountainous and polluted Pittsburgh, or Dionde:gâ. Sierra’s art practice is heavily influenced by her studies in pigment biochemistry, her work with a local environmental non-profit focused on water quality and polluter accountability, and her human and non-human teachers across time and space. By collaborating with foraged native, invasive, and waste-stream pigments found in waterways, she records biological and social relationships between local riparian ecologies and industrialization.

Sierra’s work also explores the idea of wild pigments as tools of (re)connection, which she believes is an essential solution in the face of ongoing climate disaster. Pigments can connect humans to deep time, to evolution, to emotion, to the minutiae that suddenly appears when we begin to pay attention, and also to the realities of colonialism, pollution, and the human waste stream.