Emily Critch is a visual artist, curator, and writer of Mi’kmaq and settler ancestry from Elmastukwek, Ktaqamkuk (Bay of Island, Newfoundland). Critch’s work was recently featured in Future Possible (2019) at The Rooms and her upcoming curatorial project mitsujuk | kussikuashu | kpitni’sewet | they sew will be exhibiting in Corner Brook in 2020. Critch will also hold a prestigious curatorial residency at the National Textile Museum of Canada this year.

In her visual practice, Critch sculpts texts with thousands of beads and creates dozens of detailed photopolymer prints. Working with slow materials (photopolymer printing, beadwork, photography, and text), Critch engages embodied repetitive practices that evoke the physicality of remembered skills. The labour of these modalities takes immense time, patience, and knowledge. Across her curatorial and artistic practices, Critch’s work oscillates around kinship, love, place, and the slow practice of taking care.

Critch cares about process. She shows us that taking time for laughter, curiosity, and empathy is an effective curatorial practice; it builds the kinship and care fundamental to collaborative creation and the kinds of world-making that are rendered possible by this work.

Critch also likes to share baby yoda memes, twinkling heart emojis, and lengthy love letters over email. She gives long hugs, likes pink beaded earrings, and loves to laugh. It is almost impossible to work with Critch without learning these things about her. She consistently takes the time to connect with her collaborators, to learn about them, their needs and boundaries, to share herself with others and feel their work deeply. She takes time to situate the work so as to best honour it, to respect the intimacy of collaboration, and to electrify the “resurgent possibility” of kinship.[1]

For Critch, the labour of care entangles intimacy and the decolonization of time. It respects and creates space for relation building, for honouring her ancestral knowledge and family practices. She believes curation is about nurturing artists, their work, and their stories. “[It] becomes about developing a relationship and really focusing on what it means to create something together.” Her curatorial practices are about intimacy and sharing space (and often, if you know her, food and laughter). Taking the time to connect, to develop boundaries and respect is, for Critch, the foundation for collaborative creation.

Critch says that curation feels familiar to her, because it feels like a way of loving and relating, a way that centres thoughtfulness, safety, and empathy. Curation can be a series of gestures and practices, an embodied compilation of protocols and teachings. They are activated through our relation to ourselves and one another, our stories and our work, to the land and to past and future generations.

Critch says that, for her, caregiving is an inherited knowledge from her Mom of how to nurture, protect, and create space for healing, vulnerability, curiosity, messiness, and laughter. When I listen to Critch talk about her Mom, about curating and her own visual practice, I hear echoes of Lindsay Nixon’s celebration and witnessing of “the power of First Nations’ love in the living, in ancient voices of the land, non-human loves and lovers, in the ones who have left the physical world but who still speak the strength of family, community and friendship, and especially for those who are coming into being now and in the future. It is a celebration of our own love medicines.[2]

Critch’s curatorial statement for Visiting: Logan MacDonald was written as a letter of gratitude and friendship to Logan. She writes,

When trying to learn more of the Mi’kmaq language, I was told by my teachers that it is a language built on verbs; words connecting our bodies and actions in relation to the land. […] The idea of home as a place is fluid and sometimes complicated. In the act of visiting and returning to where our families come from, it helps us to learn more about our connections between our bodies and the land. Ourselves.[3]

In her love letter to friendship, language, and land, Critch shows us how curation can be a “love medicine” that teaches, connects, and reconnects.

In the context of institutions that enact violence in myriad ways, slowing down and celebrating intimacy is, for Critch, a way to honour the stories and the work. It is a modality of queering the linearity of productivity and consumption, a gesture of care and protection, and an act of decolonial love. Critch says that she is “very much focused on [questions like] am I moving forward in a good way? How are things being done? Is everyone feeling safe? Am I feeling safe?” These questions braid together in her work. These questions are “disruptive curatorial strategies” that resist an “authoritative and anonymous institutional voice.”[4]

Critch’s curatorial practices teach us that when we engage our communities and the messiness of our own lived experience, or when we are working with family knowledge, we have a responsibility to honour, respect, and tend to ourselves and one another with great care.

For Critch, the affective and emotional labour of caring is a matrilineal knowledge that resists the capitalist consumption of a transactional industry. Taking the time to learn about and tend to each other’s needs—in the often violent context of institutional and industry spaces—is powerful. Critch’s curatorial and artistic practices, grounded in kinship and community, “rage against the gallery and the current affairs of arts administration, asserting that [they] happen in the streets and around kitchen tables.”[5] Critch’s work turns to the kitchen table, the roadside flowers, and family memory, insisting on the radical capacity of care and intimacy.

The current affairs of arts administration in Newfoundland and Labrador is, in many ways, horrific. Our provincial gallery spent $20,000 in hush money to cover up the hiring of an unqualified Lieutenant Governor’s daughter in a six figure position this past year.[6] In 2017, we became the only province lacking a department with the word “culture” in the name. After public outrage, the province quickly amended this, settling on the “Department of Tourism, Culture, Industry and Innovation.” Treated with the same extractive profit drive of the oil, fishing, and mining industries, “culture” has become synonymous with tourism and profit for the provincial government.

When corruption and extraction become the sole practices of our leadership, and the government and the oil industry seem indistinguishable, Indigenous youth like Critch—who are learning their language, taking care of their communities, celebrating their culture, protecting their stories, defending their land, and honouring their ancestral knowledge—are caring for our collective future.

Critch uses care as a radical modality that allows her to connect with her family knowledge, her culture, and her identity. While wanting to learn more about her family, Critch set off on a road trip with her Nan to Pinchard’s Island. It was a trip that became the impetus for her profound and technical work, Pearly Everlasting. Reflecting on the familiar tension between knowing and not knowing that haunts many of our family archives, Critch says, “I grew up listening to my grammy tell stories about where she’s from and her parents and her mom,” she says. “I know so much and at the same time I don’t.”

On the long drive from Corner Brook to the resettled community in Bonavista North, Critch’s Nan stopped on the side of the road to admire the pearly everlasting flowers that grew in droves along the side of the highway. Traditionally used as a medicine for the common cold, pearly everlastings are both common and exceptional. Technically a sunflower, the tiny buds are yellow, with white petals and tough stocks. There is something oceanic and infinite about a sea of wildflowers that seems to time travel across generations, decorating our memories and perfuming our stories.

Critch’s work reminds us that in order to carry our grandmothers’ stories we must also care for the lands and lifeways that are inextricable from those stories. The tenderness and detail of Pearly Everlasting, with its use of text and sculptural ruggedness, honours the land-based storytelling of Critch’s grandmother and asks viewers to question how we care for embodied, ancestral histories that are archived in roadside flowers, rockfaces, and waterways.

The exhibit mitsujuk | kussikuashu | kpitni’sewet | they sew, which was shown at the Newfoundland and Labrador Craft Council in St. John’s in 2019 and will be presented in Cornerbrook in 2020, does what Jessica Johns calls “Indigenous world-building,” which “centres creative sovereignty, deliberate care and kinship that is predicated on both interconnected and differing experiences.”[7] Critch does this world-building with a needle, stitching together the “threads that span generations” between the “interconnected and differing experiences” of Mi’kmaq, Innu, and Inuit in Newfoundland and Labrador. Featuring work by Alex Antle, Melissa Tremblett, Vanessa Flowers, and Flora May, this exhibition celebrates how “women exercise their political and creative sovereignties by caring for their histories and kinships through radical acts of stitching.”[8] Each work honours these lands, intergenerational knowledge, the technicality of craft, and the artists’ story and practice.

For Critch, slowing down and taking care are essential practices in this process of worldbuilding. Curation becomes a modality to build intimacy, laughter and ideas, histories and futures. As an artist, a curator, and a writer, Critch engages various mediums through practices of care and the “resurgent possibilities” of kinship. By tending to this radical affective work, Critch’s practice asks us what worlds might erupt from the memories of roadside flowers.

[1] Carina Magazzeni and Erin Sutherland, “Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby,” in let’s talk about sex, bb (Kingston: Agnes Etherington Art Centre, 2019), 11.

[2] Lindsay Nixon, “Making Space in Indigenous Art for Bull Dykes and Gender Weirdos,” Canadian Art, April 20, 2017, https://canadianart.ca/essays/making-space- in-indigenous-art-for-bull-dykes-and-gender-weirdos/

[3] Emily Critch, “Visiting: Logan MacDonald, A Response by Emily Critch”https:// www.emilycritch.ca/visiting-logan-macdonald

[4] Lisa Myers, “Tunirrusiangit: Kenojuak Ashevak and Tim Pitsiulak,” InuitArt Quarterly, January 29, 2019, https://www.inuitartfoundation.org/iaf/inuit-art-quarterly/iaq-read/details/iaq/2019/01/29/tunirrusiangit-review

[5] Lindsay Nixon, “Making Space in Indigenous Art for Bull Dykes and Gender Weirdos,” Canadian Art, April 20, 2017, https://canadianart.ca/essays/making-space- in-indigenous-art-for-bull-dykes-and-gender-weirdos/

[6] Ryan Cooke, “‘Hush Money’: Government cut $20K cheque to person hired at The Rooms before Carla Foot,” CBC News (Newfoundland and Labrador), January 8, 2020.

[7] Jessica Johns, “Indigenous World Building at the Vancouver Art Gallery,”Canadian Art, December 19, 2019, https://canadianart.ca/essays/indigenous-world- building-at-the-vancouver-art-gallery/

[8] Emily Critch, “mitsujuk | kussikuashu | kpitni’sewet | they sew: Curatorial Essay,” https://www.emilycritch.ca/mitsujuk-kussikuashu-kpitni-sewet-they-sew

At a curatorial talk, Junaid stated that the impetus for this exhibition came from John Akomfrah’s Vertigo Sea (also on display at The Rooms). Akomfrah’s wash of water, sound, and history takes viewers through a constantly moving ocean, asking us to consider the oceanic sublime, a space of wonder and magic, violence, destruction, and death. It’s this wash of contradiction that Junaid locates in this place now called Newfoundland and Labrador: a wash of beauty, connection, and foodways, on the one hand, and silence, violence, and haunting, on the other.

Junaid grew up in St. John’s, and she feels the city and its landscape deep in her bones. One might then reasonably expect that she would have encountered stories of Black life during her childhood. But as she observed during her curatorial talk, such stories never formed part of her girlhood education. St. John’s, and Newfoundland and Labrador more broadly speaking, have instead long been imagined as white spaces shaped by Irish and English (and to a much lesser extent French) histories.

Perhaps it’s unsurprising that the overarching theme of the exhibition is that of silence: the silence of forcibly suppressed stories alongside the silence of lost ones. What Carries Us includes not only a variety of works by artists based in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, and the UK, but also archival materials and archaeological artifacts. Taken together, they invite us to reflect on storytelling and identity, and on how we might imagine things differently.

The theme of silence is told perhaps most hauntingly in the form of the garments worn by a man with the initials W.H., an otherwise anonymous sailor of African heritage whose grave in Labrador emerged in the 1980s as a result of coastal erosion. The garments rest alone in a darkened room, their story a reminder that twenty percent of all British and American sailors in the early nineteenth century were black men. What brought W.H. to these shores? How long was he here? Which parts of this place had he visited? Who did he encounter along the way? How did his voice sound? What were his favourite foods? What did he do in his spare time? These are silences we can’t recover; they remain only in shadows.

Meanwhile, Shelley Miller’s Trade (2020), constructed as a series of seemingly edible blue-and-white tiles made of icing sugar, gelatin, and edible inks and arranged in the form of a patchwork tile mural, offers a material commentary on the ways that the unfree labour of enslaved Africans and their descendants in the Caribbean supported and sustained European wealth. I’ve seen such tiles in many Dutch museums over the years, often decorating fireplaces and kitchen walls. Here, however, they tell a very different story, drawing out the triangle trade that linked Newfoundland and Labrador with Africa and the Caribbean. Perhaps because of my own Dutch family histories on my father’s side (histories that tangle simultaneously with Dutch Caribbean colonial histories of slavery and indenture on my mother’s side), this piece stood out most to me. The stickiness. The sweetness. The sugar that binds oppression and wealth together, all of it captured in innocuous blue and white tiles that you can buy in any cheesy tourist shop in the Netherlands. What was the cost of sugar? asks the title of a novel by Surinamese author Cynthia McLeod. What, indeed.

But silence is not just grief-laden or mournful in this exhibition—it’s also pointed, political, and playful. Camille Turner, whose Afronautic Research Lab featured at the 2019 Bonavista Biennale, returns here, locating histories of enslavement not just in faraway Caribbean colonies but also right here in this place. If the island of Newfoundland is seen, today, as an isolated outpost, its history gestures towards a long imbrication in the Atlantic slave trade. Turner’s immersive research lab, which includes not only film but also a table filled with books, archival materials, and the tools of the archival researcher’s trade (pencils, blank paper, magnifying glasses), chronicles the nineteen slave ships constructed here and reminds us that it’s all too easy to separate ourselves from messy, oppressive histories. It also asks us to consider what it means to take up a violent inheritance.

The work of Sonia Boyce takes a playful carnivalesque approach. In “Crop Over” (2007), a two-channel video installation, she chronicles a Caribbean festival, with all the colours, music, and dancing so common to many Caribbean celebrations. But Boyce’s “Crop Over” is playfully—and pointedly—subversive. Her characters dance not just in the streets but also through houses and landmarks created as a result of the trade in slaves and sugar. Stilt-walking folk figures dressed in sequined outfits romp through formal gardens and clamber around staid sitting room furniture. They plant themselves on stone balconies and peer around corners, their presence a mocking reminder of the unruly, colourful bodies whose unfree labour made these great homes possible in the first place. In many ways, “Crop Over” reminded me of the spoken word poetry of El Jones (“Dear Benedict” in particular): it’s cheeky, spirited, pleasure-filled, parodic, and, at the same time, deeply political.

What Carries Us is not a large exhibition. And yet it packs a punch. Each element, from the archival materials to the archaeological artifacts to the artworks, offers an opening towards a reimagining and a retelling of Newfoundland and Labrador and the people who have visited its shores and called it home.

Images below courtesy of Lisa Lipton. Stills from her upcoming feature film, THE  IMPOSSIBLE BLUE ROSE, 2013.