qathet Colour: an Invocation

A body of work made with wild pigments from the Sunshine Coast

Solo Exhibition at Tidal Art Centre, Klah ah men, Lund, BC, Canada

Artist Statement

Welcome to the world of botanical robots. These creatures are an amalgamation of the more-than-human world and today’s technologies from which I cannot escape; they’re creature visitors that emerge while drawing with two hands out on the land, sharing wisdom from past elders and insight from future ancestors. These creatures have a natural origin. They have a future of growth and decay. They are illuminating a path forward for today. 

I feel like I’m in sapling phase with animism, learning my own ancestral practices connected to the natural world while surrounded by Coast Salish stories and practices. I’m gathering my culture and learning ways to walk and honour this place without appropriation or continued extraction. I am grateful and honoured to live in this beautiful place, lands cared for by the Tla’amin People since time immemorial. 

These paintings are made with a contemporary palette of qathet, not just pure botanical pigments, but also pigments I have made from invasive species, waste, and metals. There is no going back. We are here in this point of history, the Anthropocene, a time for unlearning, healing, a collective rite of passage for our species. Are you up for that? We can be like the water, and I keep asking the water, “What keeps you coming back around?” 

The colours are blankets, comforting contemplation blankets whose forms come from a bilateral drawing practice, an embodied drawing practice I learned in my art therapy training. The lines come from listening in place. 

It’s war time right now, but today is our temporal, anti-capitalist festival. 

The world is like this for a moment; It’s a doorway to a different way. 

Rest is a portal. 

Dormancy is in. 

So is dancing for the sake of dancing.

Letting go is planting seeds. Don’t fall prey to productivity mindset masquerading as growth mindset. The ladder goes to misery and power-mongering. 

Listen to the whispers specifically for you. 

Can you hear them? 

Remember your child self. 

Connect them to today. 

Connect them to this land. 

The colour holds and invokes the storylines of here, qathet. 

Sumac berries from my sister’s neighbor, salmon pink. 

Tumulth from underneath the cedars, iron oxide, ochre.

Woad once used as warpaint now grows in my settler garden, blue jean blue. 

Marigolds and onion skins from gardens and kitchens throughout the community, warm yellows.

Copper wire from a friend’s reno, gives us turquoise. 

Invasive english ivy pulled from the trees it was strangling, velvety black. 

Between invasive and time immemorial,

The colours invoke our hope for a way forward.