Title: Reincarnate II
Medium: Sustainably sourced otter fur, moss, found monarch butterfly
Dimensions: 5"x5"
Year: 2018
The old me has died
But I've not taken a new form
Soft, hold my mushy insides
Will you still like me after sea and storm?
Shove me into this meat tube
Too tight sausage esophagus
Shelter me the way you did before
Shapeless, drifting, unsure
I'm out of style and you're in season
Tasteless, spineless, unpure
All apart, rattled, shook, not much more
Nature is made pretty for a reason
What good are these eyes with no mouth and soup for brains?
Do you like me now, baby baby?
With these guts, bones and the hurricane remains?
My paintings explore futurity within Indigenous abstraction, using traditional techniques of hierarchy, natural science, metaphysics, mapping, mark-making, ancestral knowledge, and dreamwork that draw relational connections to the animate body and the physical landscape. The paintings function like a collection of thoughts, representing skins of identity, the psycho-social fragmentation that occurs from experiences of grief, diaspora and cultural uprooting. I paint using contemporary Western abstraction through fluid acrylic paint pouring, marbling and colour mixing. I apply beads, string and drawn lines over the found patterns in the paintings to imagine my own landscape through playful, psychological investigations. Each painting beckons a task to map my inner world through simulated, psychometric Rorschach tests.
Talismans and Star Stories is a series of small scale paintings on 5”x 5” wooden panels which are artistic explorations in protective spell work. The intuitive and time consuming process of interpreting the physical or material qualities in each painting functions as a meditative act of accessing channeled information. Ritual acts of making summon automatic thoughts and reflections upon themes and patterns, including astrological events, plant and animal symbolism, cultural stories, parables, allegories or myth. Each painting is guided by this process, holding those specific energies within the object. Some paintings may include encoded information, colour therapy, stones, plant and animal fibers which hold meaning and talismanic qualities intended to attract certain strengths into oneself or one’s life
Title: Neural Network
Medium: Sustainably harvested birch bark, computer wires
Dimensions: 5"x5"
Year: 2018
Title: Nmepin | Wild Ginger
Medium: acrylic, beads, mesh wire, rue bundle on 6x6 wooden panel
to see the wild ginger
you have to look low
Where in abundance they grow
Such secrets
don't obviously show
And wild bees don't dance
To lead you to their honey
Spinning dizzily
In patterns, come to me
Perhaps they're lonely you see
Venus can beguile you
Snake sheds irridiscent incomplete
attractive to those hungry for your shiny
Who only want to meet you when you're weak
Licking the rinds, but only when you're tiny
when you're so vulnerable they'll feed
Intoxicated on your glitter
Salaciously trying to consume
Everything bright about you
Wait until I'm new
The snake dance can wriggle out
Of this pattern
A sigil of purification
I'll emerge
Title: Salmon Run I (1 of 2)
Acrylic, beads, sunstone, rose quartz on 5x5 wooden panel.
A meditation on annual salmon migrations across the Pacific coasts.
Title: Salmon Run II (2 of 2)
Acrylic, beads, sunstone, fish vertebra on 5x5 wooden panel.
A meditation on annual salmon migrations across the Pacific coasts.
