Forage (To Heal)
2018
Site specific installation, linocut and ink on fabric and paper
for Chouftouhonna Feminist Art Festival, Théâtre National Tunisien Tunis, Tunisia.
This piece consists of hundreds of hand printed linocut images of the Saskatoon berry (Amelanchier alnifolia), a plant native to the region where I grew up. When I was a child I would pick wild Saskatoon berries with my mother and my grandmother to save for the long winter. It was the one food I would always turn to when I was sick. One winter in a strange city, overwhelmed by personal crisis and searching for healing with no stores of Saskatoons nearby, I started to draw them instead.
Lately I have been doing a lot of thinking about visualizing ‘revolution’. How we depict such a huge concept in our movement art and the symbols we have chosen to represent us often fall into tired clichés that I feel disconnected from. I am searching not only for other representations of transformation, but other ideas of what ‘revolution’ means beyond the theatrical drama of barricades and molotovs. I am interested in the slow, steady, often feminized work of building community, caring and healing that is the foundation on which all deep social transformation rests. What are the symbols and visual metaphors we can use for this kind of revolution? How could identifying with those symbols change our perspectives and our priorities?