About

My mother still brags that she never gets lost in the bush.  As a child I would go out with her picking berries.  We each would find our own small patch and keep moving so as not to over pick. This keeps you at quite a distance from each other. I have to close my eyes to remember the bush as it was. The ground is mostly moss and lichen covered rock, dry and crisp from the midsummer sun, with evergreens, low bush, and wild blueberries that hover over the rock like tiny velvety blue Christmas balls. The scent, heavy and warm, an intermingling of dry pine needles, spruce, fir, dead wood, pungent earth, fresh growth. We listen for bears. The insects sing the air visible; black flies, deer flies, mosquitos, and dragonflies chorus around us, nipping. Everything is still, but vibrating, and I vibrate with it. I’m not really that interested in picking, just in being here. When I look up, I see the top of my mothers head of dark hair, so different from my own, and I know I belong here. I am this place, this place is me.

         This place lives in my memory …  as do all the voices of this place, both present and not (everyone from there knows that all the flies have their own season). At the time, I didn’t understand that there was communication happening in that chorus of vibrations. I only understood it as home.  Now my mother tells me I don’t want to return to that place. It has changed. Of course all places do.  Like everyone I know, my mother included, places too, embody emergent processes shaped by relationship and time’s powers of transformation (Bjornerud 2020).

I am interested in learning more about the nature of my relationship to the land I am intrinsically connected with, the subtle and explicit relations between us, grounding my process in an intimate exploration of entangled systems.  My methodology is intimate, self-reflexive and phenomenological. Embracing embodied knowledge, I listen to, participate with, and learn from the more than-human-world we call Nature. Using traditional plein air painting, photography, video, sound recordings, and writing as both investigative devices and tools for immersive transcription (Shields, 2018), I am piecing together fragments, small movements and details in an exploratory fashion, all in search of a larger dance of embroiled elements that re-conceives our human and more-than-human relationships. Essentially, I am learning how to dance.

My approach is performative because it is participatory.  Through my process I have been learning to trust the experiences of my own body, and the direction of enquiry that these experiences are taking me. In this manner I become Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s “body-subject”.  For much like him, I am rejecting the disembodied transcendental ego and living "the sensuous and sentient life of the body itself” (Abram 1997). In other words, my body, this experiencing self, is continually subject to the affect of its surroundings, and it reciprocates — I participate.

In terms of participation, Ann Whiston-Spirn (1998) reminds us that our perception is always informed by our culture. It is important to be cognisant of where I come from, to remember that I am a white, housed, underemployed, middle-aged, queer, able-bodied, neurodivergent, cis-female human of mixed ancestry and working class background, living in a capitalist, colonised country.  Whew. What does this mean? It means I am a veritable mess. It means I have been both subject and object and have learned first hand the relativity of privilege.  Although I was born in this country, I still find myself far from the land that shaped me and I am perpetually lost.  However, I am not a monolith. This mess of markers of identity (and there are many more) are also continually transforming and evolving because this body of mine is intimately connected with and influenced by the rest of the world — a world that is ultimately made up of the same stuff that everything in our universe is.  

I am currently located on the Confluence of the Bow and Elbow Rivers. It is situated in the very heart of Calgary, Canada on Treaty 7 land whose First Peoples I acknowledge with respect and gratitude for being the original caretakers of this marvellous place where I live and work. This includes the Blackfoot Confederacy of Siksika, Piikani, and Kanai First Nations, Tsuut’ina First Nation and the Stoney Nakoda (including the Chiniki, Bearspaw and Wesley First Nations), as well as the Métis Nation of Alberta Region III.

If you are at all interested in reading a few things I have to say about working on the river, please read the book Water Rites, a truly fantastic collection of art and writing about water edited by Professor James Ellis and a publication of the Calgary Institute for Humanities.