Statement

In 2019 I agreed to participate in Milkweed’s Wildfire art project, as I had done many times in previous years. The idea of the project is to receive a creative work from another, which then inspires the recipient to create a new piece which is then passed on to the next person. My Wildfire spark arrived from Mary Lou Meiers in January 2020. Mary Lou was creating prayer bundles and writing about a line which is a cirlce. It led me to think about prayer ties, prayer bundles...prayers.

How to express that? for whom? Prayers from what tradition? How would I create prayer bundles without feeling that I was appropriating someone's sacred teachings? I thought of the line and circle and my dancing thoughts led to the idea of embroidering onto a dress-- a line that goes around the dress; a circle prayer. A prayer for women, for women suffering-- for murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls. I found a website that listed the names of murdered and missing Indigenous women in Canada (https://www.cbc.ca/missingandmurdered/). I purchased a red dress and began using the orange and yellow colours of Mary Lou’s prayer bundles. The lists on the website could be viewed by province, so I started with the names from Ontario and moved east. So began my line/circle prayer at the bottom of the dress. Working west from Ontario, the list of names increased and I became overwhelmed with the task, at which point I reached out, asking for volunteers to embroider names onto ribbons that I could then attach to the dress. Several women and girls responded and with their help, I was finally able to complete the 307 names listed on the website.

Luci Dilkus, with gratitude to the ribbon volunteers:

Jude Gibson-Vick

Tamara Benoit

Nell Casson

Alta Wilbur

Liliana Ormaza Saraza

Sandi Danilowitz

Georgia Cromarty

Samantha Barber

Emily Evans

Annabella Poplak

Sadie Kopyto-Primack

Vita Wind

The Red Dress Project