Statement

Before we initiated the project and before starting my own piece I did some reading as a way of lowering myself into the context. This felt like a part of the gathering in. Then when I received Negik’s work, after spending some time talking with him about it, I simply spent time sitting with the work and taking it in. My initial response was with sound made while looking at the work. I recorded these sounds and then played them back while I made my initial painted marks in response to the sounds. So sound became an intermediary between the two visual images allowing space for the intuitive. Those first marks were abstract, gestural and expressive. They did not represent things as such. I did however want to move in the direction of representational, possibly symbolic imagery, inspired by Negik’s approach. These images began to emerge as if of their own volition from the shapes, lines and colours that had initially arrived in my own painting. A process of making and refining then took off from there. Occasionally during this I would replay the sound recording that I initially made and this served to reconnect me with Negik’s piece.

In considering my approach I wanted to come up with a way that allowed a multidisciplinary arts-based response to the many and complex issues involved in the reconciliation process. And I was very aware that I did not begin to understand what reconciliation is or how you do it. Trusting that the realm of the imagination draws both on intuitive ways of being as well as conscious rational understanding I felt that the image should be at the centre of what I did and that it would provide a synthesizing force. Synthesis and reconciliation seemed like they might be similar and compatible impulses – a weaving together of difference. This honoring of the image was reaffirmed by what I heard and experienced in our initial sweat lodge. I wanted this to be a spiritual journey and one that could connect as fully as possible with the artists who preceded and followed me in the process and with all that had informed the larger Truth and Reconciliation process. This seemed to call for a gathering in and then a letting go.

When the painting seemed finished the final step was to write a poem that drew both on the visual experience as well as reflections on the intangible process of making the work as sources of possible insight with respect to the act of reconciliation. The poem and painting were then passed on to Robert, the artist who followed me.