Oil, spray paint, and charcoal on canvas, 54" x 54", 2018

My paintings are made over the course of many weeks during which I layer diaristic drawings, text, and abstractions of celestial bodies. This particular painting references early astronomical diagrams as well as the Roman god of doorways, ""Janus."" Over time each layer gets buried and beaten back into the surface. Parts of the painting fall away, get reborn, and change entirely through an intuitive process. Even after the painting is finished, the surface will change ever slightly over time due to the materials used. For me, this ever changing surface is a metaphor for our own personal narratives--for how we weave the abstractions of our experiences into story, and furthermore, identity. The story of the past is unending, always changing. This phenomena is what I chase through my creative practice.

This film depicts a conversation about how women are seen in Euro-Western ontologies and in an Indigenous (specifically Coast Salish, Lushootseed) cosmology, and the roles they have, or are denied, in shaping worlds. It is influenced by two Indigenous women scholars, Marama Muru Lanning and Vanessa Watts. Muru Lanning writes, "There is danger in perceiving Indigenous groups as discrete, bounded systems in a functional way and representing indigenous knowledge as undynamic and unchanging," which is what lead to the film existing, instead of a drawing. (Tupuna Awa, p. 155)

Watts writes, "Through processes of colonization, the corruption of essential categories of the world (the feminine and the land) has led to a disconnect...in how agency is circulated through human and non-human worlds in the creation and maintenance of society."" (Indigenous Place-Thought"" pp 20-34). This film's nebulous, textural atmosphere references the spaces in which we place our assumptions about what we know.

The research begun through this film will be continued over the summer of 2019, traveling to the Salish Sea region to conduct a comparison of Coast Salish and Euro-Western ways of knowing and representing place through a range of mediums, including singing, legal documents, weavings, paintings, photographs, and carvings.