I can never explain how my art is made because it just happens. Like asking a song writer the same thing or a writer of novels.
Northing more painful than the void of idea.
Over the years I’ve met many who tell me they couldn’t draw a straight line to save their lives and I think I understand that to a degree now. I share that about my relationship to numbers and measure conversation.
I say conversation because in all of our places of knowledge we work in we have a community. We gravitate towards forces that pull us in. Pavlovian but by nature. Sometimes I think the beauty and tragedy of our being is the very idea we know so much. We are all just explorers really set out on adventure.
Years before I started my path as an artist others laid a foundation just like anything else it changes. There was a time I looked to one painting or sculpture from this or that artist but I always wanted more from them.
When Bruce Cockburn released “Waiting for a Miracle” I admit I bought it only for it’s art cover. I wanted to connect to something that was Native desperately for feeling so alone in my plight for connecting to being Native. It was all there in the album cover though. Robert Davidsons design the moved Native art of our region forward.
I was looking to an outside world for feeling of worth and didn’t realize the value of songs I had been raised with from many houses until I was able to look back at how I clawed my way up from inside a dark place believing that Coast Salish art was erased or irrelevant.
hał čed
I talked about severance of Chief Sitwell for many years. It come back to me until I watched the Reverent. Capturing a number of ideas in film and the power of it.
There are two sides to every tale. In my belief there can be healing in that. Some stories are written before we get here, battles before our birth. One becomes a born enemy of a family one does not know for years. This is complication of progress and time sped up to be effective but damaging.
To be clear I am not descendant of Sitwell but I value everything and his warriors for my existence
The father who raised me comes fromf Whitebird. I am far away from that bloodline but it drives this idea from Chief Joseph. Not that I will Fight no More Forever but I will love my people far beyond my time.
Our things transform and new songs are made. I am moved to tears at times to see these things happen before me.
I understand Patkanim betrayed my old family but it was before my time and there is nothing I can do to erase that damage. What I can do is make a design that honors sacrifice and reverence for our mountain and warriors before my time with great love and admiration to get me to this place at the foot of a mountain to have ko, To have salmon and company. It gives me paws.
We are nothing without this land and what it give to us. So much knowledge lays beneath our feet and within our bones we don’t thing about.
Still foreign families write music about us and all humanity.