Beaded Temporalities

Size 8 beads on a found branch , 2020.

 

This land-based piece is the creative result of an exploration into the notion of visiting methodology through deep engagement with land, family and kinship centred within Indigenous ways of knowing and being. Centring Dylan Miner’s Methodology of Visiting and Janice Gaudet’s concept of Keeoukaywin: The Visiting Way, along with other supporting decolonizing methodologies, this piece is a visual embodiment of my own personal relationships to my ancestral land, family and ancestral kin. It is a collaborative piece beaded using peyote stitch by my family and I during the first Covid-19 pandemic lockdown in Spring 2020.

 

Returning to my home community to be with family in isolation during this time brought me to think about the possibility of creating space for Keeoukaywin as a source of medicine. Each bead stitched by my family and I holds the stories, knowledge and conversations that were talked about while practicing Keeoukaywin. The beads are purposely positioned in a gradience of colour to signify the movement of Indigenous temporalities of time and space that move backwards and forwards simultaneously. The piece does not have a proper beginning or end. Its continuity flows back and forth through the beads acting as a symbol for the continuance of embodying visiting within our everyday lives as an act of decolonization.