My work for a number of years has been concerned with the two areas of inquiry; the first being the exploration of anishinaabe traditional knowledge (as remembered in the rock drawings, the petroglyphs, the birch bark drawings, traditional stories, and the lyric poems) from my own community and how this can be used in contemporary life.  So much within these traditional images and stories talk about how to see and be in this world in a way that emphasizes the importance of relationships, caring, and connections. 

The second is the contrast of the incredible beauty of this world and my increasing concern for the state of the world in terms of the increasing destruction of natural ecosystems and how this is manifesting globally in droughts, floods and fires. Recently, I’ve been collecting newspaper articles about these issues and creating text from this to use in my work. 

I have worked with a variety of media to address these concerns: I have created performances that focus on the need for a better connection to the land; my garden work as curatorial space creates exhibitions emphasizing relationships and natural cycles; my visual art uses handmade paint and printing techniques to speak about the need to slow down and work deliberately which is contrasted with high tech printing of text and acrylic paint. Cutting the canvas and sewing it back together also focuses on the hand made as well as the process of bringing different things together.  In my work at the Tamarind Institute and with the painter Glenna Matoush I learned about the method of chine collé – working in layers, and this has helped me to think of it as a way to represent memory of things lost, or the past, things trying to come to the surface. Each layer for me becomes a different time period; the first is the primordial time and is represented with the staining using natural plant and mineral dyes; the second with drawn figures and the stenciled pieces of words from traditional songs, and the third, with the strong words taken from newspaper articles about the forest fires last summer interspersed with pieces of reports of the increasing pace of drilling and extraction of resources represents the dominant philosophy of our contemporary world. These words dominate, they lie on top and obscure the layers beneath. Like the Group of Seven, who would include a bit of blue in the sky so their painting would not be too suffocating, I’ve also left spaces where the viewer can move through to the layers below.   

In his report for the Bureau of Ethnology in 1886, W. J. Hoffman noted that one of the keys to reading the drawings in the birchbark records (scrolls¹) of the Midéwiwin Society of the Ojibway² lay in the lines that connect the figures and other beings. These connective lines he terms “determinatives” and writes that “The Ojibwa… exhibit greater advancement in the incorporation of gestures and the suggestion of abstract ideas with graphic devices” (in E. McLuhan, 1978: 21, citing Hoffman, 1886: 44). Determinatives were also found in the rock drawings in the Great Lakes region that is used to connect a variety of beings that are similar to those in the scrolls (Dewdney and Kidd, 1962: 172). In the Woodland School of painting determinative or connective lines can be found among the figures, connecting them to a variety of other figures, objects, and beings.

In my work for this exhibition, I draw from the idea of determinatives from the Ojibway tradition as a device for making larger connections in a graphic device as I attempt to explore and connect the visual culture (mostly referencing the Peterborough Petroglyphs) and textual culture (songs) of the Anishinaabe with some larger pressing national and global issues in contemporary society. 

These paintings ask: can the philosophy of the Anishinaabe or their way of being in the world contribute to some of the solutions facing society living in a world where we are living with the results of a disconnection with the land and an economy based on extraction?

In our contemporary life it has become increasingly important that we create new imaginings of seeing and being in the world and I am hoping this work can contribute to this.