Statement

This piece was inspired in part by a trip to British Columbia in the fall of 2015. I visited a site that had many petroglyphs carved in the stone underfoot. They were scattered over a large area, partly obscured by foliage and leaves. I wondered how much was still covered that hadn’t been viewed for hundreds of years. Not too much was known about these carvings, their significance, or why this site was chosen. There were also a few locations where someone had carved their initials in the soft stone in much more recent times. It made me think a lot about how fragile cultural memory can be. How fleeting and transient the memory of an individual, or a family, or a community can be. Perhaps there are entire cultures whose existence is completely unknown to modern peoples.

I chose to use a router on birch plywood because I was thinking about this idea of cultural excavation, about trying to recover memories, recover history, meaning and truth after much time has passed. I've painted fragments of the petroglyphs on the surface of the plywood. The excavation reveals hints of a buried or forgotten, a tragic history of abuse and oppression. The excavation reveals hints of a buried or forgotten history, a tragic history of abuse and oppression. Most significantly I chose to paint, in the excavated space, a group portrait from a residential school in British Columbia.