Japanese artist Tomo Ingalls stands at the centre of the Tompkins Studio Hall within the Saint John Arts Centre. It is pitch black except for a soft spotlight hitting the performance area. A 220lb circle of recycled clay is surrounding her, with a larger circle of participants sitting in front of hanging tapestries splattered with pigment.

Slowly, Ingalls begins to push out from the pile of clay until she reaches a participant on the outer rim, hands them the clay, and then returns to the circle and repeats. The clay doesn’t fight back, but the weight of its presence remains.

From October 21 to 23, 2022, ArtsLink NB, a provincial organization meant to unify New Brunswick’s arts and culture sector, hosted its inaugural Arts Atlantic Symposium, in Menagoesg (Saint John, NB). The theme of the symposium, Future Possible, was inspired by keynote speaker Mireille Eagan, who is the contemporary curator of The Rooms, and editor of Future Possible: An Art History of Newfoundland and Labrador (Goose Lane 2021).

Over the course of three days, a series of installations, panels, talks, and workshops explored how Atlantic Canada’s artists plan to greet the future while addressing past failures.

The Arts Atlantic Symposium was originally planned for 2020, with professional event coordinator Mark Burnett’s vision, but was waylaid due to COVID-19. Through the collective effort of a small and passionate team of professionals and volunteers, the symposium finally took place this past fall. It was guided by a committee of ArtsLink NB Directors, and relaunched with the efforts of visual artist and curator Sarah Jones, and musician and professional tubist Gabrielle Carruthers.

A number of challenging conversations happened over the symposium. To those communities most vulnerable, a smile and nod wasn’t going to cut it.

I felt this concern as I observed the panel “Building Momentum,” in which a group of Disabled artists, writers, educators, and arts workers discussed disability access in the arts community. The panel was co-facilitated by Alexis Bulman and Gerald Beaulieu, and featured a discussion with Raven Davis, April Hubbard, Vie Jones, and Aislinn Thomas.

The panel title reminded me of Ingalls’s performance, as the issue with momentum is that it can be cancelled out by an opposing force. As I listened to the panelists’ experiences, I felt their exasperation with the lack of support provided to them. Each speaker entered the conversation from a different viewpoint, with a different accessibility requirement, but with a similar goal of wanting to build a more accessible arts community. “True equity costs money,” says Thomas, an interdisciplinary artist.

That future felt visceral, closer, as I listened to Mi’kmaw artist Starlit Simon’s speech during her “Resistance, Reciprocity and Roadkill” talk with fellow Mi’kmaw artist and mentor Tara Francis, at the Saint John Arts Centre. Simon’s memorable laughter filled the room, while Francis meditatively worked on a piece of porcupine quill art, softly smiling as she listened to Simon’s stories, at times stopping to amusingly quip back. “We should live with what the land wants, not what your boss wants,” says Simon.

It was invigorating to listen to stories from an Indigenous perspective, learning about the logistics of porcupine roadkill—how much time you have to reach the animal’s body, how long the porcupine can last, how to honour the body—and seeing the works of art created by a practice that Simon and Francis are trying to keep alive and outside the hands of cultural appropriators.

In a way, Simon and Francis’ panel felt like a conversation I would have with my own family, a circle of Chinese immigrants playing mahjong, laughing and sharing stories outside the realm of the colonial White narrative and aesthetic that I still see in many shows by White curators (even though they try to include diverse experiences). Simon and Francis’ talk exemplified why we need more underrepresented communities leading events instead of being a small addition to larger conversations.

Artist and educator Alex Turgeon explored early queer back-to-the-land communities in his talk, “From Here to There and Back, Again: Reflections on BOONIES,” at the Saint John Arts Centre. Before the internet, rural queers had to connect through grassroots mail publications, sharing everything from tips and tricks to living off the land to compu-poetry, contributing to rural queer worldbuilding.

In addition to workshops and talks, the Arts Atlantic Symposium also featured installations throughout Saint John, including: Jalianne Li’s 100x1x2 with Collectif HAT and Xavier Richard, plus the separate installation, 100x1x2xMirrorball with FRACA. COVID-19 provided unique challenges and Li, as an artist and dancer, filmed and published online her dance improvisations from her travels and during lockdown.

This culminated in a site-adaptive performance (former) and installation (latter) that melded physical and digital into a sort of meta-performance, with moving projections of her dance videos overlapping with her on-site performance.

In a similar vein, artist Jordan Hill explored the uncanny valley between real and fake with his installation Horizontal Vertigo. Simulating the act of staring out of a vehicle while on the highway, and looking at the treeline at high speed, the installation projected over two inkjet-printed white screens allowed it to wander and weave between the spaces.

Artist Camille-Zoé Valcourt-Synnott’s piece Dear Hiring Committee made visible the invisible labour of being a professional artist: the grant writing and job application process. While accepted submissions culminate in shows and other public-facing opportunities, much of the artist’s time is spent applying for funding in order to make work. Valcourt-Synnott’s installation projects a recorded video of a cover letter that the artist works on, and follows it through its creation and editing process.

Another public installation featuring the Erasure Art Collective (Shauntay Grant and Tyshan Wright) captured a different type of editing process in their live installation Blackout, exhibited at Jones Gallery. Grant and Wright produce new narratives from slave ads by using black pigment to cover words through the poetic technique of erasure. I watched as they spoke quietly to each other, painting black acrylic over a grotesque ad until only this text remained: be GIRL. 23d June, 1800. [sic]. Prior to the Erasure Art Collective’s performance, I was horrified at the existence of the slave ads and shocked to see them hung on a gallery wall.

Grant notes they never erase the same text twice, accepting the potential for imperfection. Once you black out a text, “you can’t get it back,” says Grant.

Many of the symposium events ran concurrently. I opted to try and see as many events as possible by underrepresented communities. Grant’s words became all too clear as I witnessed the pain left behind by settler-colonialism, ableism, sexism, racism, homophobia, and more. I had the privilege of being able to hear the experiences of people from different communities that struggle to live within the boundaries erected by a White capitalist society.

Still, the road is paved with the injustices that allow it to exist in the first place. “Roadside Attraction,” a panel discussion facilitated by writer and curator Christiana Myers featured artists Rebecca Blankert, Nat Cann, Hailey Guzik, Chantal Khoury, Alana Morouney, Christina Thompson, and KC Wilcox. The panel addressed some of the unsettling architecture and culture surrounding New Brunswick as a tourist “picture province,” and the arbitrary values that we imbue objects to perpetuate a myth of cultural significance. At the centre of the conversation lies the highway, the contradiction that guides us to our destination, but also hinders us from seeing what lies beyond.

My grandmother, Rev. Alfreda Evangeline Smith (née Simmonds), was born October 23, 1939, in North Preston, Nova Scotia. She learned quilting from her mother, Annie Simmonds, who made quilts to help her family survive brutally cold winters in an uninsulated home. My grandmother was a proud descendant of Black refugees who evaded American slavery and migrated north to Nova Scotia in the early 1800s, bringing with them their songs, stories, language, customs, and crafts. Skilled in various arts like basketry and quilting, our ancestors most likely cherished their creations for their functionality more than for their aesthetic makeup, but tradition bearers like my grandmother have helped shift this perception and the overall practice of African Nova Scotian quilt-making over time.

A lesser-known trailblazer in the local arts community, my grandmother ushered the movement of African Nova Scotian quilts from community homes to gallery walls. In a message shared with our family moments before my grandmother’s funeral in the fall of 2021, curator David Woods wrote: “In 1998 when I was putting together an exhibition of Black art in Nova Scotia, Alfreda asked if I was including quilts in my exhibition ‘because quilt making is what the Black women did.’ Her simple question led to me including [her] quilts in that exhibition and also led to the start of a number of quilt exhibitions from Black communities across Nova Scotia that is still going on today.”

My grandmother’s query would change the evolution of African Nova Scotian quilt-making and influence a number of exhibitions including In This Place: Black Art In Nova Scotia (1998), The Secret Codes: Quilts from and Inspired by Nova Scotia’s Black Communities (2022), and a retrospective exhibition of our family’s treasured heirlooms called Stitched Stories: The Family Quilts (2016). Presented at the Dalhousie Art Gallery, Stitched Stories featured the quilts of my grandmother alongside her mother’s Winter Quilt—a partially burned bed covering my great-uncle discarded after a house fire, which my grandmother then rescued from the trash. When my great-uncle asked what she wanted with “that old quilt,” my grandmother simply replied: “It’s history.”

My grandmother’s deep regard for African Nova Scotian and African diasporic histories shines in works like Underground Railroad, a quilt inspired by the tradition of embedding fabric with patterned “quilt codes” that illustrate narratives tied to the legendary network of safehouses and routes used to guide enslaved African Americans north into Canada.

“Smith had a solid sense of colour and design and stitched together beautiful objects,” says Peter Dykhuis, past director and curator of the Dalhousie Art Gallery. “Over the years, as her craft matured, and her skills became more complex, the immediate usefulness of the quilt in the home was supplanted by Smith’s desire to tell a story. Hence, the Underground Railroad quilt, loaded with images and codes. It could warm one’s night if needed, but its message was best read when hung on a wall.”

This enthusiasm for telling stories through quilts shows up in other projects, like a 2008 collaboration with the North Preston Seniors Club that led to the group’s quilt being exhibited at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic in 2009. My grandmother’s role instructing the women in the making of the quilt is remembered by group president Ivory Provo.

“I enjoyed working with her,” says Provo. “Her patience, her laugh… When she was showing you how to put the quilt together and if you made a mistake she would say, ‘We’ll just take our time and go back over it.’ Lots of patience.”

My grandmother’s patience I remember well. I remember her standing over me when I was 23 and rushing through my first quilting lesson, struggling to guide a patch of blue fabric through the shiny parts of Nana’s sewing machine. A couple friends I’d invited to come with me that day sat across from me at the kitchen table, clutching their perfectly stitched squares, waiting for me to triumph so our informal sewing class could move on. “Take your time,” Nana says. I feel her gently trying to guide and steady my hands with her words.

One by one, my square patches morph into triangles and trapezoids—the fate of any fabric passing through my impatient hands. Feeling as if an old family custom had somehow become lost on me, I avoided my grandmother’s eyes at all cost, as she freed my crooked patchwork from the tiny jaws of her sewing machine. Nana held it in her hands, studying the awkward shapes, the unevenness of the seams. “It’s okay,” she says, smiling as though I’d done something good. “You’re gonna make what they call a ‘crazy quilt.’”

The fact that my first try at quilting lacked the symmetry and polish my grandmother cultivated over time in her work is perhaps inevitable—the roots of this family tradition are tied to the uneven fabrics found in my great-grandmother’s Winter Quilt. My great-grandmother Annie Simmonds made quilts out of strips of old coats and sweaters randomly stitched together by hand. Yet from this seemingly haphazard approach to textiles emerged, from my grandmother’s hands, a refined practice full of colour and vibrancy, highly decorative and multifunctional, rich with ancestral memory, and steeped in stories from home.

Dartmouth Halifax-based artist Emily Lawrence posted Aquarius Dessert on her Instagram (@emilylawrenceca) on February 1, 2021. An elegant, salted crème brûlée dessert is pictured like a dancer in a white fluted bowl situated slightly off centre on a white ground. Golden candied hazelnuts rest like fallen stars on the flame-crusted sugar surface of the brûlée, each piercing sugar-crystal tail tapering upward to support a dramatically suspended ethereal cloud of sunshine spun sugar. Underneath the image, in the thoughtfully crafted caption, Lawrence expounds this dessert in the style of a monthly horoscope forecast: “A cold-to-the-touch dessert enrobed by a thick, salty crust allows the Aquarian to enjoy a bit of smashing, like they would systems of belief or oppression. … Much like their out-of-the-box thinking, the caramel doesn’t just lie on the surface, candied hazelnuts reach up towards a spun sugar cloud where visionary brilliance can run free. …”

Aquarius Dessert is the first installment of the Zodiac Desserts (2021–2022) series. Born from the darkest days of the COVID-19 lockdowns, the Zodiac Desserts series was a project with specific parameters—a dessert dreamt up, crafted, styled, and photographed every month to symbolize the corresponding sign of the zodiac. For Lawrence, the project was intended to be an imaginative offering to create connectivity for herself and others during prolonged periods of isolation. The Zodiac Desserts encouraged Instagram scrollers to identify with the desserts themselves, or to tag friends who are “bold and ambitious” Aries, like peanut butter and jam bombe cakes with amber rum flambéed meringue, or “centre-of-the-universe” Leos, who are like a vanilla bean and sunflower seed butter crème diplomat filled “croquembouche personified.”

While Lawrence lets scrollers know that they can find the full recipe for each extravagant dessert on her website, she is not imagining desserts that will taste the best, nor is she creating dishes that scrollers will find easy to make. Lawrence notes affably, “Is there a more delicious ice cream sandwich combination than the cucumber mint ones in the Gemini Dessert? Absolutely. Is a mushroom flavoured meringue from the Taurus Dessert the best flavour imaginable? Absolutely not. For me, the concept and clever combinations is the most important part. That said, I would never compromise taste.” In Zodiac Desserts, Lawrence makes fantasies out of sugar, butter, flour, and dreams.

At the same time as she was beginning to post the Zodiac Desserts, Lawrence shared on Instagram another series about food fantasies, further utilizing social media as a platform for connection and engagement when it was not possible to visit galleries or meet in person. Kids’ Menu (2021) is a series of photographs of outlandish and over-the-top culinary creations inspired by children and youths’ “dream meals.” A year earlier, in the first months of the pandemic lockdown, Lawrence circulated a playful worksheet for kids to fill out with their caregivers, asking them questions about their favorite flavours and foods, inviting them to imagine and then describe and draw their dream meal. These meals could be anything and were without constraints—there was no limit of stomach capacity, budget, or availability. Lawrence worked to make these dreams material with fantastical results. Imagine pancake soup featuring toasted mini-pancakes floating in milk, a parfait of dill pickles with honeycombs and strawberry jam, goldfish crackers swimming in sparkling “spicy” water, and decadent mac and cheese cupcakes, to name only a few. Lawrence understands that for many people “foods containing super-sized doses of sugar, fat, and bright colourant elicit a deeply rooted physiological magnetism.” With this project, Lawrence tapped into the unfettered culinary imagination of young minds that are often less restrained by decorum and entrenched moralizing social messages surrounding food, eating, and bodies.

While the Zodiac Desserts present fantasies of foods that look too good to be true (and often are), Kids’ Menu serves enchanting culinary misfits that are surreal phantasmagorias that would probably taste too weird to be yummy. Here I return to my earlier point that Lawrence is not designing and crafting foods that are meant to be “real”—dishes and recipes that are actually functional (delicious, easy to make) or accessible (inexpensive, not too time consuming, not requiring special tools or skills).

In this way, Lawrence subverts the expectations of Instagram scrollers used to engaging with the carefully curated visual culture of food, cooking, and eating posted by food and lifestyle influencers that are trying to sell scrollers cookbooks, products, events, or other branded goods. Lawrence’s artworks presented on Instagram are a significant departure from the majority of foods and recipes posted on social media platforms in that she is not selling anything. Generally, influencers specifically design recipes to make intricate meals easy, affordable, quick, and, above all else, tasty, claiming to make the inaccessible fancy cuisine of gourmet cooking a reality for the untrained everyday person who is working with ingredients they can pick up from a common grocery store. Lawrence is instead materializing food dreams that she hopes people will connect with deeply in their bodies and their imaginations.

Lawrence’s food-based practice aims to tap into feelings of desire, pleasure, wonder, and wellbeing that smelling, tasting, feeling, and looking at food can elicit. By unabashedly revelling in the bodily delight of foods in these two projects, Lawrence offers scrollers an island of reprieve amongst the food-shaming and fatphobic blur that is much of the food culture on the internet. As I scroll Instagram today, so many posts about food, eating, and bodies centre shaming and moralizing rhetoric (“losing the pandemic 20!,” “guilt-free foods for treat days!,” and “eating clean!” are some examples). I want to be clear here: food is absolutely a political and moral issue. Who can afford restrictive diets based on fresh produce and meat? Who has the time to cook food from scratch? Where is food in local grocery stores coming from and what are the labour and environmental practices in those places? Who can afford to live close to a grocery store? Who is centred by the colonial and White supremacist standard of the beauty industry that demands mandatory thinness? Why are people killing themselves (literally) to be thin? Why are fat people cast as moral deviants (lazy, greedy, slovenly, unrestrained, undisciplined, weak, stupid, unable to care for themselves)? In this world, celebrating the embodied joy and pleasure of eating, and the beauty and glory of food is a radical political act. For me, Lawrence’s food-based art projects set me free. They give me permission to get a bit freaky in my frying pan (maybe I’ll add this weird star shaped fruit to my stir fry?) and approach everyday meals as a playful event (perhaps I’ll have a whole purple-themed picnic?). There is something beautiful and powerful about making our own dreams come true each day in the bites we make and take.

In 2009, the preeminent Canadian craft historian Dr. Sandra Alfoldy wrote, “perhaps the fact we do not possess an instantly identifiable “Canadian” craft aesthetic is our aesthetic.” Beauty and truth are found in and among our differences, and authentic realizations come to fruition when we connect both because of and despite these differences.

It is this type of connection that fuels the Atlantic Vernacular project, spearheaded by the tenacious team at Craft NB. Driven by Fatema Pagdiwala, the exhibition coordinator; Alison Murphy, the executive director of Craft NB; and curator Gillian Dykeman, this virtual exhibition paired together 30 artists and 29 poets to undertake acts of pointed collaboration, resulting in a series of compelling visual and literary interpretations on the theme of the Atlantic Vernacular. The results are a multi-lingual, multi-disciplinary collage of material art, poetry, and prose—a feast of Atlantic perspectives.

The works flow between tales of belonging, struggle, and perseverance. Many of the poems dance between literal descriptions of materiality and technique, such as poet Ian LeTourneau’s homage “Sea Urchin” after metal artist Alanna Baird’s “Bronze Sea Urchin #23,” and Kathy Mac’s poetic musings “Sunk in Thought’’ on Tammy McClennan’s found object mixed media-based sculptures “Float Devices.” Other works delve into the artists’ connection with these materials, eloquently put in Triny Finlay’s poem “We Cannot Be Contained,’’ a villanelle based on Maja Padrov’s interlocking ceramics. Finlay writes, “we want to see ourselves in everything: put/ birth marks on fruit bowls, pour our own blood in the vase.”

Some of the most intriguing works step into the arena of social and environmental commentary, questioning the failed promises of industry in a broken system that leaves the planet and the population at odds. The disgust for this degeneration is clear in Thandiwe McCarthy’s cutting poetic critique, “What is so Wrong with Enough?,” inspired by textile artist Josie Clarke’s wall hangings made from industrial waste of decommissioned and abandoned worksites. McCarthy writes, “The working class tricked to work the planet to death. / Look now at all that is left. / Instant message families that hate communication. / We’ve built a disconnected disposable digital nation.”

Many of the poems also include audio recordings by the poets themselves, which bring the individual voices together to form a contemporary Atlantic Vernacular. Poet Jordan Trethewey’s poem “Darker Shades Often Lurk,” inspired by the rug hooker Laura Kenny’s series “Maud,” honours the artist’s struggle and questions the exploitation of those living in poverty. Kenny reinterprets Maud Lewis imagery with second-hand clothing from Frenchy’s and yarn from Briggs and Little. Trethewey writes, “My grandmother watched the world pass by her window while hooking rugs. / Meagre supplement to disability pension earned by Pearl’s husband, Harry. / What was discarded, now elevated—too precious to tread upon. / Darker shades often lurk beneath palettes of primary colours.” Throughout the digital exhibition, many voices from across the Atlantic region rise to the surface, with poems written and performed in English, French, Spanish and Indigenous languages. Poets who write in English are translated into French, and Visual Arts News magazine’s editor Shannon Webb-Campbell’s “Pink Up Parched Earth,” inspired by ceramicist Darren Emeanu’s work, was translated into Mi’kmaw by Joan Milliea.

One of Atlantic Vernacular’s most powerful collaborations is Michelle Sylliboy’s L’nuk hieroglyphic poetry in response to Oakley Wysote Gray’s incredibly moving work “Mei Eimotieg – We are still here,” which is made of red pig suede and beadwork. Gray drew inspiration from Mi’kmaq artifacts from local museum archives, and describes the work as an “interpretation of Mi’kmaq double curve designs,” as the black ink spills “represent the ink used to write the Indian act.” The artist captures the meaning of the ink as a “weapon to contain us and minimize the connection with our ancestors. But today we are still here. Standing strong, even through the effect of the Indian act. Our will is stronger than the ink.”

Discussions of place, land, and the idea of home are tied together in Meagan Musseau’s “Elmastukwek,” interpreted by poet Mihku Paul. In the poem, “Her Signal Skin,” Paul writes: “Home is not a printed label, flattened symbols pressed to paper. / Here, there is no false notion of ownership, only those who belong. / Elmastukwek is/ a voice that speaks river and forest, / a windy hand that strokes grassland and meadow, / a sky that sings to the sea.”

If all had gone as planned, the Atlantic Vernacular exhibition, which started in 2020, would have been showcased live, but the project moved online due to the pandemic. This shift in presentation reflects our larger Atlantic experience—it creates a sense of intimacy and camaraderie despite distance, laying bare the disconnects between us, paired with a hope that, despite all odds, we can make it work.

While it’s easy to imagine these works hung together in the warmth of a well-lit gallery, the virtual presentation lends itself to another form of intimacy—an independent and emotional one that can be reached by anyone, anywhere, at their own pace. Here, the three-dimensional white cube gallery is swapped out for a two-dimensional white cube layout on a website, trading steps for clicks and leaving only the barriers of digital accessibility to overcome.

In a self-directed tour of the exhibition, one can speed through, or slowly digest each piece and soundbite. Binding words to forms, audio recordings of the poets add a human voice to the static nature of this platform. In this digital exhibition space, the viewer makes their own connections. We cannot touch the works, but they can touch us. The Atlantic Vernacular can be found at atlanticvernacular.ca.

My first time seeing porcupine quillwork was watching my Aunt Connie create pieces at her kitchen table when I was 16 years old. It was mesmerizing to watch her take tiny quills and insert each one meticulously into place. I still remember the rhythm she created. When I began my own exploration into Indigenous Arts as a student at the New Brunswick College of Craft and Design in 1999, I was led by the late Elder Gwen Bear, and Carola Knockwood, who was the porcupine quillwork instructor at the time. From there, I enrolled in the Surface Design program, and graduated from the college in 2002. It wasn’t until 2004 that I decided to take up quillwork again, as I wanted to make a basket from the birch bark that had been gathered by my grandfather, the late Chief Anthony Francis, and gifted to me after he passed.

As a Mi’kmaw artist, I am committed to the preservation of our traditional art practices and the use of natural materials gathered from the land of our ancestors, known to us as Mi’kma’ki. I have carried these traditional teachings forward into my contemporary work, which addresses Indigenous issues and reacts to important events taking place that affect our people. My porcupine quillwork incorporates sacred and ceremonial teachings and the Mi’kmaw language, and I continue to teach the traditional craft throughout the Maritime provinces and into Maine. Though I believe it is our responsibility as traditional knowledge holders and artists to pass the knowledge on to the next generation, for many years I felt alone on my porcupine quill journey, as I only knew a handful of people who still practiced the craft. The Quill Sisters have changed all this.

The Quill Sisters is composed of contemporary porcupine quillwork artists Melissa Peter-Paul, of Abegweit First Nation; Cheryl Simon, originally from Abegweit and now living in Halifax; and Kay Sark, from Lennox Island. They are a joint force, working together to revitalize traditional birch bark insertion quillwork in their home communities and throughout Mi’kma’ki. Their united goal is to educate and preserve the traditional practices and ornate patterns of our ancestral work, while building their personal styles and expanding the boundaries of the tradition in step with modern times.

I first encountered Peter-Paul’s work when we exhibited together at the Petapan Indigenous Artist Symposium in Dieppe in 2016. Through Peter-Paul, I was introduced to Simon’s work, and I came across Sark’s quillwork through social media. Not long after discovering Simon and Sark’s podcast Epekwitk Quill Sisters, I was invited by Simon to be a guest on the episode “Chatting with a Pro,” which aired on September 6, 2021. In this episode, we discussed how my institutional background affects my practice, and other issues relating to quillwork and craft. It was the first time I connected with other artists who shared such a passion for porcupine quillwork, as well as knowledge about how we gather our natural materials, and what tools and techniques we use. Epekwitk Quill Sisters is an ongoing podcast that spans conversations around traditional knowledge and interviews with Elders, quillwork artists, and curators. It touches on cultural appropriation, understanding the value of quillwork, and so much more.

The Quill Sisters’ most recent endeavour, Matues Revisited, was a powerful exhibit at the Mary E. Black Gallery at the Centre for Craft Nova Scotia, curated by Aiden Gillis and Jordan Bennett and on display from January 21–March 13, 2022. The exhibition included framed quillwork pieces from all three artists, as well as installations, three-dimensional forms, and a learning room where visitors could experience various displays and write-ups touching on the history of quillwork, the raw materials, and sustainable harvest.

I had the pleasure of watching the Quill Sisters in a virtual artist talk on March 10, 2022. It was hosted by curator Gillis, an Indigenous Arts Programmer at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, and delivered through Craft Nova Scotia. As part of the conversation, the artists addressed the issue of “consuming culture,” and how having an Indigenous curator allowed the artists to have a more hands-on approach than a museum’s colonial curatorial one. The artists collaborated on how the work was displayed, the inclusion of multi-sensory exhibits, and the information available to help visitors gain an understanding of and respect for the culture of quillwork. They also worked together on educational aspects of the exhibition to encourage Indigenous youth groups to participate and learn more of the history and process of quillwork.

Like myself, each sister has their own histories and inspirations behind the reason they took up quillwork. Simon and Peter-Paul recall being young and seeing their mothers’ collections of quill baskets, and wondering how they were made; however, it wasn’t until adulthood that they saw actual Mi’kmaq quillwork made by Mi’kmaw artists. Simon recalls the reverence in her mother’s voice when she would speak of the work. The first time Sark saw quillwork was when Simon’s pieces were on display at her band office. From there, she ended up taking a workshop with Simon, who ignited her passion for the craft. Peter-Paul also cites Simon as leading her to the craft—she apprenticed under her before taking an in-depth study of quillwork, the traditional materials, and the techniques required. She has now taken it on as her full-time career.

Peter-Paul believes Simon’s drive and passion for the work continues to inspire her. Simon is inspired by the historical works of our Mi’kmaq ancestors, reinterpreting their designs and styles, and often using a section of an ancestral pattern to communicate her larger intent. “I have noticed that when I am around a lot of Mi’kmaq people, I get a lot of designs coming to me, which is reflective of the energy and connection we have collectively,” says Simon. Sark finds inspiration in her day-to-day life, be it the flowers she sees growing in her garden, or what she happens to be watching on TV.

When it comes to the gathering of natural materials, the Quill Sisters and I are all on the same page about the importance of sustainability and the protection of our ancestral practices. Having grown up in a family of traditional ash basket makers, Peter-Paul follows the protocols handed down from her kin in her approach to gathering sacred sweetgrass. She shares this knowledge with the sisters and others who she knows will respect the land and resources. Simon speaks of gathering her natural materials in how she marks her year, as there are small windows of times that are best for harvesting. Sark embraces the importance of family in her harvesting practices—they all do it together—and enjoys sharing the practice with her children knowing that she has passed it onto the next generation.

“It’s amazing that it’s just so normal to them now, and including them in this is very important to me. I want to teach them things about their culture. I want them to feel the connections that were not given to their father and I growing up,” says Sark. “I want them to have access to all the knowledge that we didn’t [have]. I want them to know the history that goes along with quilling.”

Each quill sister mentioned the overwhelming feelings they encounter when they hear the sound of the birch bark snapping as it is harvested from the tree. Peter-Paul and Sark live on Prince Edward Island, and they must travel to New Brunswick to find their porcupines, which are collected from the highway. The gathering of materials has been even more challenging over the past couple of years due to pandemic restrictions.

As contemporary Indigenous artists, the importance of passing on the tradition is a big responsibility to us knowledge carriers, and the sisters have seen a large increase in quillers. Simon mentions how she has noticed that a lot of family members are now engaged in active harvesting and are attempting the craft for the first time. Simon spent a lot of time at the Matues Revisited exhibition, and she had the opportunity to connect with many visitors in person and online. Peter-Paul and Sark were able to travel to the gallery and join Simon for the final day of the exhibition, and they were very pleased with how the exhibit came together under the respectful care of Gillis and Bennett.

After a well-deserved break, all the sisters plan to continue doing their quillwork. Simon has plans to work with more 3D pieces, Peter-Paul is preparing for workshops in Ottawa over the summer solstice as part of the nation’s capital Indigenous People’s Day celebrations, and Sark is prepared to go wherever her quillwork takes her next.

Personally, I believe the Quill Sisters and I are strongly committed to the journey of being porcupine quill artists, and I deeply relate to Peter-Paul when she says she draws her “strength from the work, as it is empowering, and our deep connection to who we are as Mi’kmaq people.” Quillwork is our connection to the land, to our ancestors, and to our families, and, like Sark says, “we just know it is what we are meant to do.”

Originally from the historic Maroon Town of Accompong in St. Elizabeth, Jamaica, artist Tyshan Wright now lives and works in Halifax. He is a traditional maker of Jamaican Maroon ceremonial objects, which are mixed media and created primarily with wood and natural forest products.

Wright recently collaborated with his wife—beloved Halifax poet and writer Shauntay Grant—on Bench Drum for the Atlantic Vernacular Digital Exhibition, which is presented by Craft NB and curated by Gillian Dykeman. Wright’s Bench Drum, is a contemporary Maroon bench made from Canadian wood and traditional Maroon beads. In Maroon folklore, bench drums originated among the enslaved Africans who later fled to the hills of Jamaica, and the shape was designed to conceal their instrumental and spiritual purpose (as Maroons were forbidden to practice their spirituality). Grant writes in her poem, “Bench Drum,” “of flight and freed/ of bush and bead/ of blood and weeping,” which is also translated into French. Just as the drum carries stories, Grant uses words to paint pictures of the long journey both her and her husband’s ancestors have walked.

Wright has presented exhibition and artist talks at Canadian galleries and museums, including the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21. His work has been acquired by the Nova Scotia Art Bank, and he’s currently a 2021–2022 Artist-in-Residence Fellow at NSCAD University’s Institute for the Study of Canadian Slavery.

I had the distinct pleasure and privilege of interviewing Wright about Maroon art, collaboration, and more. Here is our conversation:

Shannon Webb-Campbell: What other collaborations have you and Shauntay Grant embarked upon? Why is collaboration important to your practice?

Tyshan Wright: When I first moved to Canada, we created a multidisciplinary work called Abeng for Canada: Day 1, a group exhibition presented by the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21. More recently, we collaborated on a multidisciplinary work called A Calling that was exhibited at the Black Cultural Centre for Nova Scotia in 2021 as part of the Ecology Action Centre’s anniversary project 50 Things: An Interactive Art Adventure, curated by Zuppa Theatre.

Webb-Campbell: How does your hometown, the historic Maroon Town of Accompong in St. Elizabeth, Jamaica, inform your art practice?

Wright: My ancestors’ struggles towards freedom and their stories of strength and resilience—passed down through their descendants—greatly inspires my work.

Webb-Campbell: How does your work explore the intersections between traditional and contemporary craft in terms of the Canadian African diasporic narratives?

Wright: By exploring an alternate future for the exiled Maroons, in terms of what would it look like if the Maroons had not left Halifax for Freetown (Sierra Leone), and what are some of the materials they might have used to recreate these traditional instruments, since most of the materials used in creation of these instruments are not here. So, I try to source materials that I believe they might have used from here to create these instruments.

Webb-Campbell: What is the relationship between mixed-media representations of Jamaican Maroon instruments and ceremonial objects?

Wright: The past informs the future. And so even though for the most part my works are not made entirely from traditional materials from my homeland, the relationship between the countries and communities that inform my work—places where Jamaican Maroons have lived and where their descendants now reside—is inseparable.

Webb-Campbell: In your artist bio, you write that ‘the Maroons’ most sacred objects include a series of traditional drums, and a carved cow’s horn called an abeng.’ These sacred objects are used for celebration and ceremony, and are significant to Maroon culture and spirituality. These ceremonial and sacred objects were denied Jamaican Maroons exiled to Halifax in 1796. Why? And what’s changed?

Wright: Through these instruments, the Maroons are able to access another dimension of life and their ancestors, which in the past aided them in the war against the colonial authorities. The instruments are how the Maroons connect spiritually to their ancestors, from whom they draw wisdom and strength. And so, in that sense the instruments are sacred and hold a lot of power and influence. Knowing this, the colonial authorities would never have allowed these instruments to journey with the exiled Maroons. And so, with my artwork I am trying to imagine an alternate history where the exiled Maroons—who are known to have continued their spiritual practice while in Nova Scotia—found a way to create their spiritual instruments using wood and natural forest products from this region.

Webb-Campbell: Here we are in 2022, and you are creating artwork based on these powerful and important sacred objects. What does that feel like for you as an artist, and how does this honour your ancestors?

Wright: With time comes change. I believe we are living in a period of transformation where we are realizing that however painful and unpleasant the past is, there is the possibility to create something beautiful, magical, and healing out of that pain. It’s a very humbling feeling. I’m just watching life unfold in so many different ways and forms. I honor my ancestors by weaving them into every fibre of my life and work.

Webb-Campbell: While Jamaican Maroons are descendants of Africans who resisted slavery and evaded capture, they created community in the island’s mountains in the 1600s. The Jamaican Maroons’ rich history originates in the Akan region of Ghana, spanning migration, war, independence, exile, art, and culture” What is Cudjoe Day and what does it celebrate?

Wright: It is a time when we come together to celebrate the Maroons’ victory over British colonial authorities and the resulting 1738 peace treaty. The celebration happens every year on January 6, which is when we celebrate Cudjoe’s birthday. During this time, we pay homage to our ancestors for all they sacrificed for us as a people, and for their continued guidance.

Webb-Campbell: What is the driving force behind your practice?

Wright: The romancing of life in its totality.

Webb-Campbell: What does your art practice look like? What is your research process like?

Wright: Because our ancestors did not have the tools to read and write in colonial times, the history was passed down to us orally from one generation to the next. So, in terms of my research process, while I do read books and archival materials, where our history is passed down orally, I tend to focus on listening to the voices of my ancestors, and my own lived experiences and understanding of what it is to be a Maroon.

Webb-Campbell: What has been your experience of being a 2021–2022 Artist-in-Residence Fellow for NSCAD University’s Institute for the Study of Slavery so far? How’s it going now, and what do you hope to accomplish during your tenure?

Wright: It is a lovely experience so far, especially to be one of the first fellows in residence at the institute and to interact with the rest of the fellows while learning from their creative practice. Two months into the residency things are unfolding beautifully. The research is going well, as is the physical artwork that I am creating—a ceremonial instrument that I hope will speak to the struggles of my ancestors in colonial Nova Scotia and how they were able maintain a sense of sovereignty.

Webb-Campbell: Can you tell me a little more about your project, The Trelawny Town Maroons: Between Sovereignty and Slavery?

Wright: My research/project examines the behaviors and cultural practices of Trelawny Town Maroons exiled to Halifax in 1796, and the effects of colonialism and transatlantic slavery on the Maroons’ sovereignty.

Webb-Campbell: What are you currently working on? What does the future hold for your creative practice?

Wright: I’m working on a series of contemporary Maroon bass drums. To date I have only made these instruments in the traditional way, but I am exploring new processes for their creation using local and repurposed materials.

The MYAL collection is viewable online at tyshanwright.com/myal. Four works from this collection will be exhibited April 2–June 30, 2022, at Montreal’s Place Des Arts as part of Festival Art Souterrain. As for the future, I hope that the seeds that I sow today will create a brighter tomorrow.

Just beyond the Queen Elizabeth Hospital on Prince Edward Island, the late September sunset washes the sky with a lilac glaze that tints the Hillsborough River below. With only one day remaining until the Harvest Moon, the celestial body is nearly at its peak brightness, but an unlikely structure along the grassy shore—a white cubic frame constructed of PVC tubing—reflects most of the moonlight. Wandering about is Charlottetown-based artist Doug Dumais, donning matching white coveralls. He is starting to pack up his tools after his fullday performance of Shoreline Palimpsest (2021), and this is where we meet.

                Evidently, Dumais has not always worked in a studio. As a former Montréal resident, he recalled the challenges of finding an adequate space, revealing his resolution: Why not move the studio outside? Although Dumais assumed this role in Shoreline Palimpsest, the artist-photographer has long been attracted to outdoor spaces—rural, urban, or somewhere in between.

                From 2018 through 2020, Dumais visited some of Montréal’s infamous construction sites in the photo series, Construction Holiday. Photographed during Montréal’s annual two-week building pause, Dumais highlighted moments of tranquility in otherwise cacophonic city corners. A leaning sheet of plywood stretches a plastic tarp that drapes like a fine silk. Afternoon sunlight casts shadows onto concrete foundations sprinkled with gravel and debris from a nearby tree. These images consider the ephemerality of construction sites, and the unexpected stillness that is found in the midst of urban change.

                In the summer of 2020, Dumais participated in Artch, a professional development initiative for emerging artists that culminates with an outdoor group exhibition. Though Artch beginning of a career as a Montréal artist, he relocated to PEI shortly after the exhibition closed, a change of scenery that would ultimately shift his work’s focus over the years to come. While PEI may not be considered a major destination for artists in Canada, the strength of its relatively small community empowers artists to engage in exciting approaches. Like many cities across Atlantic Canada, Charlottetown’s art scene has been rapidly expanding in recent years, with festivals such as Art in the Open attracting local and nationwide audiences and a string of recent public art initiatives engaging local artists.

                Presented in five performances over the summer of 2021 (three in July, two in September), Dumais’ Shoreline Palimpsest is one of three public art projects supported by Creative PEI and The River Clyde Pageant. In alignment with the project’s initiative, Shoreline Palimpsest highlights the importance of living shorelines, referring to how natural protective processes such as root growth can aid in the fortification of PEI’s fragile sandstone coasts. Shoreline Palimpsest reveals a very real problem that Islanders have been experiencing due to climate change.

                Over the course of a restless twelve-hour period along a narrow slice of shore behind Charlottetown’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Dumais photographed the tides as they went in and out. Then, he printed black and white images from a portable printer housed within his makeshift cubic studio, combining each print with handwritten poetry or prose. Beyond its aesthetic merit, the performance reflects the immediacy of people’s relationships to the Island’s terrain. In a province where agriculture is a leading industry, land availability plays a crucial role towards the livelihoods of many.

                “Islanders are proud of being Islanders, and they have a much more immediate connection with the landscape that isn’t like anywhere else in Canada,” says Dumais.

Another key component to the successes of Shoreline Palimpsest is the public’s involvement in the work, simply by stopping through the area where Dumais set up his studio. Some would come only once and share stories of how the Island’s diminishing perimeter washed away their family’s property, while others—hospital staff on their daily lunch breaks—visited multiple times and did not interact with Dumais, but rather observed from a distance.

Over the course of its five performances, approximately 120 people came to interact with Dumais; as a result, Dumais cultivated connections to Islanders new and old. Many visitors were agents in the meaning-making of the work, even taking a print home for free.

“It all quickly went from producing art to producing conversations,” he says.

Through the guise of an artwork, Shoreline Palimpsest communicates a scientific concern by provoking small-scale community awareness of the ecological issue. Dumais recalls a quote from the late science fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin: “Science explicates and poetry implicates.” Shoreline Palimpsest resulted in emotional responses, both realizations by the artist and his visitors.

In recalling his work in Montréal and PEI, respectively, Dumais acknowledges that his practice contains methodological undercurrents to the literary figure of the flâneur, the male urban dweller, and the movement of Romanticism, where man is usually at the centre of the sublime and often-feminized natural world.

“I like to think that the temporary aspects of my practice are my ‘escape hatch’ to problematize my indirect correspondence to these movements,” says Dumais.

                On the print that I got to take with me after my visit to Shoreline Palimpsest, an image of beach grass is overlaid with cursive text: “A small monument to my passing through this place.” Dumais is more than just passing through. He is leaving a tangible and communally engaged impression through the careful art of quiet observation and listening.

Creating community in the arts is especially important for those who identify as disabled.

In October 2021, members of the disability arts community gathered online for the first annual Disability Atlantic Arts Symposium (DAAS), hosted by JRG Society for the Arts. Artists connected on Zoom to discuss pertinent topics surrounding the experience of being a disabled artist. Divided into three separate Zoom sessions with panellists from around Atlantic Canada, the event included conversions that addressed the impact of the pandemic on disabled artists and discussions on the funding available for disabled artists. On the last day, there was a cabaret showcase performance.

The online event highlighted several key topics relating to life as a Disability-Identified artist and creating interconnectedness in the disability arts community.

I have only recently included myself in the Disability- Identified arts sphere. Living with an invisible illness, I have always found it difficult to place myself on the same level as those with more visible disabilities. Each panellist brought insightful perspectives on their unique lived experience as a disabled artist. As an attendee, I felt welcomed and accepted, and I left feeling inspired to create and share my work within the evergrowing community of Atlantic Canadian Disability-Identified artists. Attending DAAS was an eye-opening experience, as it showed me that disabilities come in all shapes and sizes, and no one disability out-disables another.

Kicking off with a panel titled “Strange Avenues,” moderator Debbie Patterson spoke with Kjipuktuk-based artists Anna Quon and Vie Jones.

Quon is a poet, novelist, visual artist, and filmmaker whose work reflects her personal journey through “madness.” She also facilitates creative workshops for those with lived experience of mental health diagnoses and psychiatric histories. With a BA in English Literature from Dalhousie University, Quon has worked in the not-for-profit sector for most of her career. She has also worked as a freelance writer. When speaking about her experience as a Disability-Identified artist, she emphasized the importance of basic rights and income—the same as any other worker in the workforce. Quon also spoke to storytelling and advocacy in the arts community.

“Most people who have something to say through their art probably are concerned somewhat about the world around them,” says Quon. “It might be the natural world only, it might be the human sphere, but I think if you’re going to make art, then hopefully you have something to say about what you’re making art about.”

Quon also expressed thankfulness to be working with publishers who understand the added pressure that has risen due to the pandemic.

Vie Jones is an Anishinaabe, Two-Spirit artist, educator, and storyteller originally from Garden River First Nation. They received their BFA in Photography in 2019 from NSCAD University, where they are currently finishing their Master’s in Arts Education. Their work is centred on education and research relating to Indigeneity, storytelling, and rejecting capitalist notions of being. They provided insight into how the pandemic changed their artistic process.

“For me, it was about how to stop making and then reintroduce, as I’ve only been able to be in a space to actually make work for the last two months,” says Jones. “And so, it’s about trying to re-engage with that, looking at what I’m making and who is consuming it as well.”

Jones also emphasized the importance of community during this time, as losing the only gay bar in Halifax during the pandemic has had an impact on their ability to create, as well as that of other performers.

Part of the symposium focused on funding for disabled artists and opened a dialogue between artists and funders from Atlantic arts organizations. Several common themes emerged, the first being the need to re-examine the definition of disability and how this classification affects an artist’s likelihood of acceptance for funding. In other words, does self-identification as a disabled artist have an impact on whether or not the artist will receive grants?

Currently, some organizations have a definition of disability, but these definitions can be limiting. Artists shared stories of being accepted for grants when they were making art related to disability, but not when their proposed projects did not relate to their disability.

Vanessa Furlong of LEGacy circus made clear that as a Disability-Identified artist it is impossible to remove disability from her work, even if the subject is not necessarily related to her disability.

“Whether or not you’ve made your show about disability, disability is there,” says Furlong. “It is in who I have on the stage with me, it is about the way that I’ve created the art, it is about who is coming into my space and enjoying that art.”

Another point of discussion was how artists fund their health needs and how arts funding affects other aspects of disabled artists’ lives beyond the creation of works, as they often face challenges in prioritizing their health care expenses over their art-related expenses. Receiving arts funding can put an artist above their allowable income, which in some cases makes them ineligible for necessary health support, forcing them to choose between health services and creation. This discussion led to the question of how Disability-Identified artists can work with arts organizations to make positive changes in funding programs and ensure that disabled artists’ needs are being met.

The overwhelming response from funders was to encourage artists to reach out and open lines of  communication to better inform accessibility within the arts sector. Lauren Williams, who works for Arts Nova Scotia, also brought forward the fact that it is the responsibility of arts organizations to ensure that they hear from the right people and not make decisions without the voices of those who will be affected by strategic planning decisions.

In the future, DAAS hopes to plan a Disability Atlantic Arts Symposium annually or bi-annually with a rotating cast of planning committee members. Their goal is to bring the disability arts community together, foster opportunities for collaboration between artists, demonstrate the need for increased accessible funding for Disability-Identified artists, and continue to give the already excellent work being made here the spotlight it deserves. Hopefully future events can happen in person, as well as online, with open calls for panellists, presenters, and artist submissions.

Planning committee member Alexis Bulman summed up the intentions behind the Disability Arts Atlantic Symposium.

“DAAS doesn’t just point to all the flaws and barriers in existing systems that prevent Disabled-Identifying artists from participating and thriving in Atlantic Canada,” says Bulman. “It’s also about expanding the imagination and celebrating where our disabilities have already led us artistically.”

As a Disability-Identified artist, I am personally invested and excited to watch the disability arts community in Atlantic Canada grow through the expansion of the symposium and beyond. For those who missed the symposium, transcripts of the panels are available through JRG Society for the Arts.

As if being anything other than White in Halifax doesn’t already make you hyper-visible, the women in Rita Malik’s short film On Being Brown sometimes navigate quintessential Maritime markers wearing gold-embroidered jewel-toned lehengas. Even though it’s an ornate shirt-over-skirt set that South Asian women reserve for celebrations, the women in the film wear lehengas on the Halifax waterfront in interactions with a showboating busker, and in a cramped small-town convenience store. One woman’s floor-length skirt reveals her combat boots while she loiters on Spring Garden Road.

Halifax-based artist Malik chose lehengas for the women in some of the ten-minute video’s scenes—which she produced in 1999 as part of a Centre for Art Tapes (CFAT) program designed to train artists new to video—purely for effect. In a place like Halifax, the choice of traditional South Asian clothing amplifies the women’s pre-existent otherness. It’s a choice that provokes gaping and gawking from White passersby on the waterfront. An enraptured elderly White woman asks Malik about one of the lehenga-wearing women: “Is she a princess?”

Malik’s inquisitive and caring lens explores identity and otherness by toggling between public space, where viewers witness firsthand how White people perceive her subjects, and private space, in which her subjects process how White people relate to them. In private, the three women sit in a living room responding to Malik’s questions from behind the camera: How would you identify yourself? And how would others identify you? A faint malaise sometimes laces their responses. They permit us to eavesdrop on their candid discussions of how being Indian in Canada positions them neither here nor there. They discuss what they might pass onto their children, and how they want to carry their predecessors’ lineages, from which colonialism has severed them. They discuss how they respond to exoticizing interrogations, like “no, where are you really from?” Though Malik wasn’t concerned with foregrounding racism when she made the work, the women’s vulnerable discussions at times reveal their experiences of quintessentially Atlantic racism—in its supposedly benevolent, feigned innocence—that felt deeply relatable for me.

The women’s lived experience mirrors Malik’s own, growing up in a first-generation immigrant household in Sheet Harbour, Nova Scotia. Malik was 32 years old when she made On Being Brown, and she had just returned to Halifax from a six-month trip to India—her first since she was 8 years old. “There was culture shock coming and going,” Malik told me. “That played into my choice of subject matter.” On Being Brown is static in time. I’d consider it to be in the same canon as Andrea Fatona or Richard Fung’s documentary video works in which they interview their subjects about their lived experiences of racism in Canada. Similarly, Fatona and Fung’s subjects address us with vulnerability, and their documentaries feature scenes that situate their subjects geographically (Fatona’s in Hogan’s Alley, Vancouver, and Fung’s in Toronto). The lived experiences articulated in those works are somewhat static in time, and possibly eternally relatable, too.

Perhaps an objective for a BIPOC artist to make this kind of personal documentary work is for posterity. Divya Mehra encountered On Being Brown by accident in CFAT’s archive in 2019, twenty years after Malik made it. Because Malik’s work explored questions of identity and belonging with people who were similarly preoccupied with them, one of the most significant things about its resonance now is that it showed Mehra a precursor for her own early work’s explorations of being a diasporic person in a predominantly White nation state. When Mehra spoke with Malik, they connected over having worked as artists in isolation in the Prairies and in the Maritimes, and feeling like no one would ever care about their work.

For the exhibition “The more things change…,” marking CFAT’s 40th-anniversary, the artist-run centre invited four artists to sift through its archive to make a new piece responding to an artwork they pulled from an assigned previous decade. Unlike the archives of Toronto’s Vtape or Winnipeg’s Video Pool, to which artists’ submissions are automatically included, CFAT’s archive is a product of past exhibitions, which were jury selected. This means the art works selected by a CFAT jury for an exhibition at any given moment became enshrined as the official record of it. Mehra’s assigned decade was 1999–2008, but the contents of CFAT’s predominantly White archive were difficult to access and relate to, let alone respond to, until she found On Being Brown. In turn, Mehra extended the invitation to exhibit Malik’s work, so that her unseen work could be seen.

On Being Brown was the second video Malik had ever produced, and a chronic-fatigue diagnosis made it her last work to enter the public sphere. But beyond its marginal trace in CFAT’s archive, Malik’s work was written out of the record of Atlantic cultural production. This erasure brings up some questions for me: what does it take to be enshrined in art history? How do the ostensibly benign mechanisms of archivemaking and art history writing sever us from the lineages that connect us to our predecessors?

An archive reflects the sensibilities of the people who contributed to its accumulation. When I examine the typically almost all-White exhibition and publication histories of the majority of Settler cultural institutions across this country, I know we can attribute their archives’ overwhelming Whiteness to their historically almost all-White curatorial or editorial teams. If an institution’s decision makers were most likely all White, then how could its archive be anything but almost all White, too?

They say that the archive is designated as a repository, as a witness, as a form of documented memory. An archive is supposed to inform the future by helping us learn from the past. Some of us might take the archive as fact. Some of us might take archive-making as neutral, unbiased and apolitical. But for those of us who must insist on being written into the record, who don’t take for granted that our contributions will be acknowledged and rewarded and remembered, the archive serves a different function. An archive serves to remind us of those who came before us, who asked the same questions, who survived similar violences.

The erasure of Malik’s work from the record of cultural production is tragic. While Malik doesn’t represent anyone but herself, and her story shouldn’t be abstracted into the symbolic, I can’t help but think: how many other artists have the narrative of art history erased in so-called Canada? This erasure reveals the confluence of the many mechanisms of history-making and the long-term consequences of institutional White supremacy. It reveals how something as routine as a jurying process dominated by an inner circle of White people determines who is worthy of getting archived, publicized, historicized, and remembered—and who is not.

Mehra’s alienating encounter with this archive—that’s exclusionary by design—reminded me of my own. During the time I worked for two major Canadian contemporary art magazines, I examined their back issues. I hardly encountered work like Malik’s—to say nothing of the scores of artists whose work these magazines mostly didn’t acknowledge until recent years. When I looked through decades of their mastheads, I also couldn’t find much evidence of my predecessors’ existence.

If I don’t see that someone like me survived before me, how am I to believe that survival—let alone anything beyond—is possible for me? When the record of cultural production severs us from our predecessors, and someone like me sifts through it, I am led to believe its false tales: that no one was here before me. This is just one explanation for the current obsession with firsts; this amnesia is one of the many insidious ways that Settler cultural institutions enable and perpetuate White supremacy.

When we’re alienated from traces of the people before us who survived, we have no blueprints for our own survival. When we’re severed from traces of those who came before us, when we know that those we see in the record now are the ones who resisted erasure from it, we can’t imagine how the record could ever acknowledge our own work. It’s only fitting that Mehra’s response to CFAT’s invitation was to extend it to make space for Malik as one of her predecessors.

Driving my car down the winding Bonavista highway, I remember how many times I’ve done this route – to watch whales, to go for a good slice of pizza, and, since 2017, to see contemporary art.

Growing up in Clarenville, a town an hour and a half away from the Bonavista peninsula, I thought I had to go away to see and make work that excited me. This belief led me to the mainland for art school at the University of Guelph, and then to St. John’s, which was as close to away as I felt I could be while still living in my home province. My practice of painting, collage, and installation explores how our homes and communities contribute to our identities. Shortly after moving from Guelph to St. John’s, I heard of the first Bonavista Biennale and realized it was being held near my hometown on a peninsula I’ve been visiting since childhood.

The excitement was palpable that first year. I felt transported to somewhere large and significant (two ingredients that felt necessary to build an art career at the time), and my misguided belief about the lack of potential in rural Newfoundland and Labrador was shattered. To cement this revelation, I sat on a cliff and watched Will Gill’s unforgettable Green Chair be endlessly pummelled by waves.

This success created anticipation for the Biennale’s second run in 2019. In the middle of my road trip, I stood in a quiet room to face the work of Camille Turner, The Afronautic Research Lab, which untangled the involvement of our province in the Atlantic slave trade. This Biennale asked me, as a settler of this land, to turn inward, with curiosities and questions about this place I call home. Turner’s work invited us to critique our believed history with a critical lens and ask: what other stories haven’t been told?

This past year, with the pandemic transforming the global experience, staying home has been our new reality. With restrictions lifting, the 2021 edition of the Bonavista Biennale took place from August 14 – September 12, which is a large achievement after months of unpredictability. Curators Patricia Grattan and Matthew Hills write about this year’s theme, The Tonic of Wildness, as “healing re-engagement with the world beyond digital screens,” which is something we all benefit from as our lives have been thwarted by devices.

The Bonavista Biennale’s most historically significant exhibition is REGENERATION | Piguttaugiallavalliajuk | USSANITAUTEN, which features a group of seven photographers—Eldred Allen, Jennie Williams, Holly Anderson, Samantha Pilgrim Jacque, Wayne Broomfield, Melissa Tremblett and Gary Anderson—all from Northern Labrador, who are exploring their connection to the natural world.

Curator Jessica Winters underscores the importance of including artists who don’t often see themselves in these spaces and how this can change the perception of Inuit art. Winters explains, “Inuit art is usually in a medium that’s really traditional and stereotypical, so this show is a take on seeing our life and culture through a new form. The work documents how relationships to our environment can change, and how we still use the land and animals.” This project is a new addition to the Biennale from previous years and offers a strong start to the festival’s lineup at the very first site.

 In addition to this exhibition, artists are installed at different locations across the peninsula. Artist Philippa Jones has created a space of secular wonder within the renovated Alexander Mortuary Chapel of All Souls in Bonavista. Orbs of cast resin float on a string and in a glittering pool that we are invited to dip our feet into. When examined, each sphere contains plants and organic matter, preserved in plastic and removed from the cycle of life, death, and decay. There is a simultaneous sense of playful joy in the pool and quiet contemplation in the accompanying drawing across the room, which changes from death to life in front of our eyes.

In Upper Amherst Cove, Gerald Beaulieu offers a glimpse into the prehistoric past with his work Extinction. His life-size replica of an Albertosaurus skeleton is impossible to drive by without stopping to take it in. Each hand-carved bone glistens with tar, and the black liquid drips from its giant jaws, reminding us that oil is a slow and unsustainable poison for us and the environment around us.

Behind the aquarium in Champney’s West sits Melanie Colosimo’s work Sync or Swim. Stuffed life preservers are submerged in an industrial fish tub, with their reflective strips glowing through windows that allow us to peer into the water. By drowning the life savers, whose typical function is to keep us afloat, Colosimo strips them of their purpose, and makes viewers reflect on the ironic way Atlantic provinces rely on the trade of goods in industries that often cause them to be left without. The preservers are linked together as we are as a region, in an attempt to keep our communities alive.

Unhistoric Acts, an installation by Robyn Love, uses the permanent structure of the fish flakes near the Mockbeggar Plantation as its site, but instead of fish we find carefully embroidered names supporting the fishing stage. Each fish flake represents a woman who worked, unpaid and unacknowledged, for the fishery economy. The black fabric of one stage basks in the summer sun, as the fish once did, while the sheer blue fabric covering the other stage erases it into the sky, almost unnoticed. This work acts as a tribute to forgotten labour. Also, with each woman named Mary—after Mary March/ Demasduit, a Beothuk woman born in 1796 and died in 1820 in Botwood—being stitched in red, it invites the remembrance of the erased history of Indigenous women who were renamed to be assimilated into Settler culture. Each thread in Love’s work symbolizes care for and reconnection with those who have been left out of history.

The work of Logan MacDonald further explores the erasure of communities, and how symbols of colonialism are protected while Indigenous and queer histories are untold and overwritten. MacDonald’s land-based installation was intended to engage with Bonavista’s bronze statue of John Cabot by covering it in mulch to temporarily erase it from the landscape, and then inviting the community to repurpose the mulch in their own gardens and trails.

After five months of planning, the permission to use the statue was revoked by the town of Bonavista and MacDonald was forced to create a new installation for Long Beach, his new site location. Ultimately, no matter the final iteration of the work, MacDonald is asking critical questions, like “what histories are we protecting that are connected to our landscapes, and why are we not making space for other histories or culturally significant moments?”

If you see a sign on the beach asking you to enter at your own risk, it might not be about the water. Sites around the peninsula also include work by 18 participating artists from across the province and country, including Will Gill, Vessela Brakalova, Michael Jonathon Pittman, Graeme Patterson, Leslie Reid, Jonathan S. Green, Marlene Creates, Christina Battle, asinnajaq, and many more. Curator Matthew Hills highlights the importance of collaboration between the work and the peninsula, explaining in a phone interview how “the Biennale is an incredible event, unique in the country and internationally significant to my mind in terms of the way it responds [to] and embeds contemporary art, and that is partially about how special the peninsula is.” The 2021 Bonavista Biennale urged viewers to go out and ask questions, experience wonder, and explore the natural environment. It was the perfect wild tonic after months of being trapped indoors.