Reclaiming Vines
My work blends elements and teachings from traditional Indigenous art & culture with contemporary mixed media ways of storytelling. My latest work combines painting with beadwork to explore themes of gender, queerness, health, community and how that exists in the individual experience of meaning-making. This piece utilizes common Indigenous symbolism through the conscious use of line, shape and colour in the glass beads which contrasts with the cool tones used in the abstract acrylic pour background.
The severance between self, identity, community and health has intimate familiarity that ties directly to experiences of colonialism, genocide and the remnants felts by residential schools. The Two-Spirit panelists as part of (Summit 2020:) Resistance and Resilience through Culture: Building a Two-Spirit Longhouse shared on the beauty and struggle of intersecting identities, both traditional and colonial. Through my work, I examine and sit with the idea that within the process of discharging disassociation, our ability to endure a journey of returning to and comfortably residing within our bodies and communities is our medicine.
Actively connecting with ambiguous, physical and metaphysical ideas of self is an active undertaking of resistance to colonial normative ways of being that does not need to sit with just the individual but within a larger context of meaning-making mechanisms that are utilized in creating concepts of self.
Click here to watch the Summit 2020 session that inspired this piece.
Jean Baptiste, KihêwMahihkanÂtayôhkanIskwêw
Jean Baptiste, is a nonbinary Two-Spirit member of the Wet’suwet’en nation in the Laksilyu clan. Since they were a child, they have been on a journey of exploring their passion of storytelling through various mediums. Their primary means of expression is beadwork and that has evolved to explore incorporating traditional Indigenous mediums with contemporary mixed media. They have also explored poetry, spoken word,draglesque and other embodied forms of expression. Each piece they produce is grounded out of their experiences consciously delving into their relationship with their body, community, history, and self-identity.