i am a real artist

The textile art pieces I wrote about in my last post were finally finished in time for the hanging of my show ‘Contemplative Threads’ in the Salt Spring Island Public library community room on May 1st. I made eight new pieces, oh my so many stitches, which I hung along with four from my 2016 project ‘Threads of an Estuary’ and some borrowed commissioned pieces, Elements of Life and Tribute to James Broughton. The room was full and alive with diversity and complexity.

Threads of an Estuary collection

Threads of an Estuary Artist Statement:

In 2016 I was living on K’ómoks territory studying fine arts at North Island College. My final project was an attempt to express gratitude and respect for the K’ómoks nation whose generosity in sharing wisdom teachings and ceremonies, educated me as white settler in aspects of history and culture about which I had little exposure to date at that time.

I began a repetitive walking practice beside/along/across/over the estuary, observing, listening, sensing, and interacting, with the beings human and beyond, and with community, culture and history. I was fascinated by the presence of wooden post artifacts, evidence of Indigenous fish traps, buried in the mud, and learned that carbon dating had shown some had been in place since 1360. No wonder I was infused by the ephemeral presence of the place.

This is a portion of the body of work I produced inspired by what I had seen in the estuary and stories I had been told by Indigenous elders. The form is intended to echo ceremony regalia and the markings to suggest traditional ways of making from Indigenous and settler cultures. The stitching evokes the patterns on the mud flats at low tides, the fish trap fences, and the felt presence of the ancestors of the place. These pieces are all-natural cotton of various weaves, hand dyed with plants and seaweeds gathered from the estuary, embellished with pine needles, reeds and stones stitched using silk and cotton threads. Each of these textile pieces was treated in direct contact with estuary waters and objects. My methodical contemplative approach to stitching embodied threads of memory into the pieces as I listened to sounds recorded beside the estuary.

In these times of change and haste, I wanted to develop an art practice that re-introduces slowness as a way of being. By using materials from my environment, in creating work that emphasises my relationship to landscape, I reclaim the rhythm of the hand-makers in my own ancestry.

My purpose in including these pieces is to show where it all began, one of the pieces contains the first mark I successfully made on fabric using seaweed.

Elements of life from commissioned collection, earth, air, fire, water

Contemplative Threads Artist Statement:

This collection has been created on the traditional and unceded lands of the Hul'qumi'num and SENĆOŦEN speaking peoples. The unbleached cotton, linen and silk textiles have been marked using a variety of found materials including flowers, leaves, barks, soils, and rusted metals. Natural fabrics and threads, are a conscious choice to use non-toxic materials of minimal environmental impact. After the eco-marking is complete, my process involves tearing up sections to create multi-layered textile bases for the pieces. My walking practice gathers visuals of the forest and ocean trails which then emerge in the design through the positions, colours and shapes of the eco-markings. As the pieces form themselves in my hands, I become the portal through which my connection to place is expressed in the combination of fabrics, threads, artifacts and lines from my poetry.

Evidence of Indigenous stewardship of these lands is everywhere. There are middens in the forest, broken shell beaches, and grassy mounds suggesting harvesting locations. I include beads, shells, small pebbles, and dried turkey tail fungus in recognition of traditional harvesting and medicine gathering practices. 

I am interested in re-invigorating ways of being that embrace fluidity of time, reflection and ease.  Slow, methodical, contemplative stitching creates threads of connection embodying my sense of place and timeless being. 

I am grateful to many who have influenced this work. The K’ómoks nation for their teachings, the Hul'qumi'num and SENĆOŦEN speaking peoples of these lands for their ongoing presence and stewardship; my art collective friends; faculty and students at North Island College and members of my chosen family for their support and encouragement.  

I will donate 3% of art sales to Xwaaqw’um & Stqeeye’ Learning Society,  a local, Indigenous-led land & culture revitalization project. Please check it out and lend your support!

As I stood back to look at the walls I was stunned at how much art I had made. This was the first time I had seen my work all hung together, so exciting to sense the way the pieces interact with each other. Then I noticed how my technique had changed since I began this work. The commissioned pieces and the eight new ones were much more detailed in their stitching, layered in their structure, and varietally complex with found objects.

As I walked away to return for my opening talk a few days later, I was convinced nobody would take this work seriously, it would not be respected as art. As I’ve stitched into these pieces over the past few months the action of slow stitching in random designs has felt like drawing with needle and thread. This art is conceptual, carefully made, conveys an essence and atmosphere. I was so afraid people would think it amateur, they would laugh at the roughness of it, the torn edges, the dangling threads, the crooked poetry, the uneven stitching. These aspects of the work are intentional in that they emphasize the randomness, imperfection and movement in the world beyond human.

I first started making art with some degree of serious intention when i was invited to join two artist/academic friends at a residency on the Toronto Islands. I had been drawing labyrinths on the beach in Vancouver for some years, a practice the three of us shared, from that seed began a ten year art collective engagement (Gestare Art Collective) which produced many performative art projects. This expanded my repertoire of art making and allowed me to see different ways in which I had been making art for years. As a witch and teacher of the craft I had been creating ritual and other art-based workings as curriculum for embodied learning. As I observed the other collective members in their art-making practices my curiosity led me to taking some fine arts courses. I learned about drawing, painting, sculpting with wood and metal and was encouraged to be inventive, my final studio project was in textiles. I showed my art at residencies, college student shows, and group shows at local art galleries in the Comox Valley. This show of my textile work was the first time I had the opportunity to independently show this genre of my work in a community venue.

Like many creatives I continue my struggle to believe I am a real artist. I look at seasoned artists’ work and compare my own work unfavourably. Moving into textile art was a conscious choice to build a practice that is non-toxic, easy to create and store in my tiny home space of 280 sq ft, and evocative of place. Definitions of fine art don’t include textile works. Textile arts are often categorized as ‘crafts’. These pieces are made in a wide variety of forms, my particular choice of form is driven by my visceral and tactile encounters with materials used in the dyeing process and the textures of the dyed textiles. The standard classification of art into mediums has been changing and I was fortunate to study with teachers whose perspective was broad and who encouraged the free interpretation of words such as sculpture, drawing and painting. Haunted by memories of art classes at school where my attempt to draw a tree rendered a failing mark, these teachers verified my experimental approach to the projects I created under their guidance and helped quell those old voices telling me art was not within my reach.

The hours of careful slow work for each piece in this show, the interpretations and descriptions of the pieces, the artist talks, interesting questions, perceptive observations in the comments book have all contributed to lifting the doubt and allowing me to believe in the art I make, and myself as an artist.

Much to my surprise and delight three of the eight new pieces sold and are now in the process of communicating with their new environments and people. The other surprise in this experience is the way my own work has inspired me to make more. The hours spent in the presence of my work gifted me with excitement and ideas for the next project.

This work came from a place in me that deeply resonates with my environment, cares about the health of the living beings I share my space on the planet with, revels in the beauty around me, relates to the places I live and have lived through talking to the land, trees, creatures two, four legged and winged, gratefully breathes the air we share and wonders at all the stories long forgotten. My art is my way of recognizing the complexities in life, reclaiming a sense of belonging no matter where I am, of finding love and care everywhere, and of expressing reverence and respect for the ancestors whose presence I feel in every place I stand.

That some of this was conveyed to people who came to the show is the highest form of appreciation I could possibly receive:

‘beautiful multi-layere footsteps through the layers of time immemorial’

‘powerful and gently tender and robust’

‘the more I looked the more I saw, textures medium and design’

‘thank you for doing this and showing your heart/teacher’

‘your exhibition feeds the soul’

‘so peaceful, thoughtful, heartening and beautiful’

‘multilayered in every sense’

‘I am moved by the soft compelling beauty of your creations’

‘ethereal and yet grounded, deeply reflective but light’

On a practical note I’d like to acknowledge the support I received from the Salt Spring Island Public Library, particularly Sophia vom Bauer Jackson, as well as the folks who came to see the work and took the time to leave their thoughts with me.

I and the Salt Spring Island Public Library acknowledge that we conduct our work on the traditional, unceded homelands of the Hul'qumi'num and SENĆOŦEN speaking peoples, who continue to use and steward these lands. Their ongoing presence feeds the life in these lands now and for the future.