spirit island

Manitoulin Island is called spirit island.

Manitoulin has a long history of settlement by a spiritual people.

Traces of these people go back at least 10,000 years in the area where I live.

I am allowing the spirit of place to come into my work.

I live on Manitoulin Island and I am white.

The culture that is true to the place where I live is not mine and I keep that in mind.  

The spirit in this land is generous and alive.

I use a hoop to help me hold the cloths I stitch.
When I work at a large scale, I feel as if the hoop helps me to hold the land.
Place and the spirit in the land are held in my lap.

Like each of us, I walk my own path of life story.

I have always lived in northern Ontario and my work reflects the isolation, solitude, big sky and water views that I grew up with and continue to live with. 

 My relationship with this land is that of an immigrant and of a settler.  A Canadian pioneer.

I look to history books, novels and poetry about the time periods in Canada when the settlers came.

I am inspired to work with vintage domestic embroideries and linens and wool blankets because so many of them came over from the old country.

I try to help them and me have a dialog with the land here in northern Canada.

I think about what daily life was like for the women pioneers and look at material objects that might hold history of it.

It takes me a long time to figure out how to honour these old textiles and make them relevant within contemporary thought and aesthetics.

I used the house shape in earlier work and now I use the bundle as metaphors for self and for the women pioneers who came to Canada and specifically, came to Manitoulin.  

I use saved domestic cloths.

I use the idea that all of us look out our windows no matter what our culture.

 All of us look at the full moon and the stars.

All of us stare endlessly at the horizon.


The text and pictures are from the talk I presented last Thursday in London Ontario.
More here.