THE ARTISTS INVOLVED
Patricia Deadman
Artist, curator, co-founder of Llama
ARTIST'S STATEMENT
My artistic practice over the past decade investigates the transitional relationship between land and culture. The photographic series, projected videos and mixed media installations challenge and reconstruct real and imagined facts of Canadian history, First Nations culture and identity.
My previous exhibition Ground Cover a series of images taken in Paris and Glacier National Park became a metaphor for cultural and social layers addressing architecture, anthropology, scientific classification, and social structures embedded within Western and First Nations epistemology and cosmology. The use of the garden with all its connotations associated with the Golden Age provided a point of departure to challenge and confront aspects of wild and tame, inclusive and exclusive and scientism and estheticism. The garden represented selection, segregation and cross breeding of imported plants. Like the pruned trees that line the Paris avenues and the geometric exotic gardens, Indigenous cultures foreign to the colonizer have been similarly categorized, classified and contained.
Untitled #1, 2007 (Paris Garden)
h22 x w15in ea/88 x 60in (7.3 x 5ft) installation, Suite of 16 photographs
My proposed project forVOZ is to research and create a new series of manipulated one-off photographic installations consisting of images from the Mexican and Canadian landscape relevant to place, history and cultural events that confront issues of rootlessness, resilience and reclamation. My non-digital photographic “blankets” fuse historical colours found in the natural dyes used in First Nations quillwork, beadwork and blankets with reference to Western tapestries, paintings and Morris wallpaper designs. The photographic truth is reinterpreted, as my process literally becomes a matter of intuitive painting or rather exposing and manipulating the print with light. Common blankets which are objects of function, reference such patterns found in Raven’s Tail weavings, Hopi or Navajo design, West Coast button blankets or Pendleton trade blankets. Native blankets reveal histories of place, individual experience and craftsmanship parallel to that of European tapestries, weavings and embroideries that position the context within the global arena of colonial discourse.
It is my intent to create a series of small tapestries or samplers woven from natural material indigenous to place such as lichen or copper thread that includes text in Mohawk, Spanish, French and English. The narrative becomes autobiographical yet universal in a shared time and place, an exchange of histories and connection to land beyond the artificial boundaries that stake claim to land. The samplers also integrate traditional non-silver photographic processes and papermaking with natural dyes and fibres reminiscent of historical tableau painting and sculptural relief found in the pyramids. Paperclay bookworks with embedded photo transfers are inspired by Mayan architecture, weavings and First Nations petroglyphs and serpent mounds that realize home, community, identity and ritual specific to place.