Artists explore life on the land with First Nations mentors

By Mary Fowles

An intercultural artists’ residency in early March organized by fine arts students brought them together with First Nations artists in a cottage near Joliette, Que.

For four days, the 11 artists and four children lived, ate, slept, shared stories and created art together.

“Our goal was to create an experience of community and collaboration for everyone involved, and to share, in terms of technique, stories and day-to-day living,” said Katrina Cunliffe.

Dolorès Contré Migwans, who is of Ojibwa origin, offered the artists her cottage. She describes herself as a “bush Native” — born in the bush, where the family’s survival is dependent on hunting and fishing.

Her background led her to work with natural materials, integrating traditional folk techniques such as embroidery with beads or porcupine quills.

The other First Nations artist, Nadia Myre, holds a Master’s of Fine Arts from Concordia and a diploma from the Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design. She had an urban upbringing in Montreal, where she was born.

Migwans has a visual arts degree from the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, and now works at the McCord Museum of Canadian History. She said, “For me, it was interesting to show students that there are different ways of being Native. Both Nadia and I are current artists, but she is urban and I am from the bush. This creates a difference, but we share a similar code of communication.”

Cunliffe, a third-year Fibres student. said, “We chose to work with people of First Nations backgrounds because it’s important that the relationships between all peoples in this country are healthy and visible.”

“Segregation within the art world is still common,” added Johanna Autin, a sculpture student who helped organize the residency. “Seeing group exhibitions of artists of different origins and nationalities is still rare.”

Felting and sculpture were the primary art forms explored in the residency.

Felt is heavy wool cloth, napped and shrunk with heat and moisture. The artists made a carpet-sized piece of felt over a huge rock that lay beside the nearby river.

They spent hours carding sheep wool into a mass of fabric, pouring hot water over it as it lay on the rock and pummelling it to get the fibres to mat together into felt. Then they sewed the large strips together to make an impression of the rock.

“Most of the experience was done in silence and with respect for nature,” Migwans said. “We tried to truly get into a relationship with nature and we became very reflective.”

The collaborative work, appropriately titled Felt Rock, was exhibited at Studio BeniM in Montreal from March 17 to 26. The installation also displayed three videos made over the trip, a soundscape montage of nature sounds such as birds, the river and walking through snow, as well as the artists’ journal entries, photographs, collections of twigs and leaves and morsels of the food they ate over the residency.

“Felt Rock is a work that was created with the idea of community in mind,” Cunliffe said in her artist’s statement. “It was not the material outcome that was given the most thought; rather, the gathering of people around an activity was seen as being the integral part of the work.

“Living, cooking, eating, sleeping, conversing, and building relationships together over a period of four days became the work of art, while the material result of the project became simply a vessel for this experience.”

Autin said, “This project was about sharing and giving through the creation of a impromptu community. In relation to society at large, in which individualism is ever-present, this work was a reminder that collaborating with diverse people in a constructive and positive way is often easier than we realize.”

Cunliffe wrote, “If art is seen as a vessel for human expression and communication, and I seem to have ethical and social purposes, then the scope of art is large and generous.”

The experience was recorded in videos that included interviews with the participants, ambient sounds of nature and even leaves and pinecones, as well as photos, drawings. A typical day involved walks on the nearby river, through the forest. Migwans led the participants in a full moon ceremony.

The group involved 11 adults and four children. “Everybody participated,” Migwans said, “The idea was to involve a family, not so the residency wasn’t just intellectual, but connected to life, to children, to elders, to everybody.”