| About the Artist |
|
Tribe: Tlingit Indian from Southeast Alaska.
I am primarily a woodcarver. I've always loved cedar, but this year I've become quite interested in casting. I like seeing both positive and negative forms and casting allows room for experimenting. I explore new ways to represent contempory issues using themes of re-creation, transformation, and containers or reliquaries. My desire to create comes from a drive to connect my past to the present, stated in my poem "Saginaw Bay", "...I keep going back, I keep trying to see myself against all this history..." When I create new forms out of the old, using non-traditional materials and styles, I bridge the past and the present. Our ancestors knew there were spirits in everything; they spoke to places, they thanked the cedar, they spoke to the creatures, they spoke to their tools. My art contains my "thought-conversations". but the materials already possessed their inherent power. My job as an artist is simply to rearrange what is, just as re-telling is the job of the storyteller. As I am creating, I am merely re-creating. Thus, my ideas come from the ones who came before me; a culture that has been here thousands of years, an artform evolving for centuries, to which I connect when I create. Last summer, I was struggling with ideas for a ceremonial staff for my tribal uncle. Weeks went by as I tried to force designs. Finally, I strung a clothesline indoors from which I hung every picture I could find of the old Kake Tlingits. I hung pictures of our traditional clan home at Saginaw Bay. I played a tape of a 1964 Kake Indian Dance practice. In those early hours, I saw that long line of ancestors, and it stretched into the future as well. At times I thought if I swung around fast enough, I would catch my father behind me; and behind him, Grampa and Gramma. By morning, the entire design was finished. Seeing myself "against all this history" makes me more complete. My artwork is a way to resolve the seeming dichotomy of old vs. new. |
