weaving worlds

Artist Statement

For three years I collaborated with three members of my direct community to build Kataliskewaq L’nuk maps through hiking and walking, travelling, visiting, using GPS and relational mapping practices, audio, weaving, and drawing. Together we created new ancestral tactile materials as a hyper-local record that indicate us as we are, in place. Together we built tools for understanding and oral transmission of our worldly place-person; we have made living documents.

These map blankets are a declaration of our non-possessive claim to place and they will live in the lives of each collaborator, not inside of colonially possessed material collections, but daily in our homes with the people, they will outlive us and touch the lives of our future families; alongside us, they will live a life of their own. As community members we’ve actively entangled our memories with the land and the lands memories with our bodies and experience of time. These were/are events that cannot be held in colonial collections or institutions, they come from us, they are for us, and they are us. These works are toward not only building our world, but transmitting it to each other in multi-directional methods and streams.

I’ll note that during the thinking, making, and doing of these map blankets, I was honoured to sit with a variety Ancestral Belongings in various museum, gallery, and archive collections - blankets, baskets, wall pockets, tools for making, records, bark maps, tools of travel. Visiting with Ancestral Belongings and then journeying to make contemporary, customary, and living ones keep us alive - they tell our story as it unfolds in this time and simultaneously, weaves in the past and touches the future. There is a power in accessing museums and held collections; it is a power we can gather and take back into our lives and communities to keep going and action toward the future, whether it’s collectively toward the very next day, or future generations.

There is powerful temporal and multi-realm connective experience in building our own world(s) forward, together, now, in our communities, with our land, relatives, and waters.

Blankets protect us in different realms and during our transitions between them. They drape us in meaning and these particular blankets show pathways - geophysical ones, but also pathways to our relatives, pasts and futures, to practices of making, visiting, and gifting. Meaning is contained between the warp and weft, the experience, and the touch of them.

From another angle, these blankets are meant to invert and trouble dominating and oppressive ideas about simplicity of Indigenous thought.

The body of them is left plain to speak back to this and to signify multiplicity in plainness, that our genius and knowledges are part of our everyday lived experiences and lead us through our day-to-day, year-to-year, and life-to-life. As human parts of our ecosystem, we live and engage through our everyday geochoreographies and we’ve done so for a very long time, in-place(s). The plain tone-on-tone twill field shows multiplicity and bares all while bearing witness to our gestures and movements with each other across Katalisk. Each blanket is made of the same warp, signifying that we’re connected through blankets as a time-stamp place-maps.

In our lifetime, we’re not going to know what our worlds would look like and who we would be without colonial interruption. But we can make the space and time to see each other as we are now, we can look forward to who we will become. Blankets protect us spiritually as we navigate the waters of what is to come and what has been, as we grow through interruption and reflect our power. As we enter new phases of life or do ceremony to celebrate, blankets can surround and hold us as our Ancestors do. Through this we experience a physical holding while we go through a spiritual moving.

This has been and is about mapping together toward recognizing place as person; to more deeply get to know our place-in-the-world; together, as a relative with the same honour, degree, respect, and rights as humanity (should). It’s about Ancestral guidance in every direction, eventing, gifting, neighbouring, and presencing; it’s Ancestoring-in-place. We’ve shared memories, made new ones, shared what has happened to us and where, and we’ve talked about what has happened to the land too. We have entangled our memories with the land and the lands memories with our own temporal experiences and bodies.

These map-blankets are an extension and expression of the place-person who we love deeply and intimately, this work is continual and made together. We renew, remember, and affirm our place-person as our relative.

Technical Specs

Weaving

Each blanket was woven on 6 shafts on my countermarche loom. The warp is a blend of organic cotton and hemp; tabby weft is the same; pattern weft is wool. The GPS motif is naturally dyed with madder root that I’ve cultivated in my gardens and is woven in to the body of the blanket by inlay. The dye is fixed to the fibre with good scouring and alum sulphate and a long curing period before washing in the sweet-water brook near my house.

All four blankets are woven with yarns from the same collection of cones on two warps; they are materially connected in that way.

Drawing

Each of the four drawings are on cotton paper with graphite. They are topographical and correspond to their partner blankets.

I want you to know

All of these pieces were made through meaningful collaboration with people in my lived-in community, they were made with and in our landscape, always near water, and they’re meant to hold each other. Each pair of pieces holds hours and hours of conversations, listening to each other, holding each others thoughts and memories, pain and healing. They’ve been made in open and honest communication, connection, and in partnership with each other. In the interest of protecting identities and privacy, intimate family and community experience and information, I’m not disclosing each collaborators name here on the internet; though when I’m sharing this work in person and in community, I certainly do.

I’m incredibly grateful for the support from each collaborator, my family, ArtsNL and Canada Council for the Arts to go on this journey in my community.