Research Interests

My research interests focus on the intersections of art practice and interdisciplinary research. Recent research focuses on connections between language and plant knowledge and doing research with/in communities where the work adds rather than extracts. As a result of spending years trying to access an artist’s archive in a major institution, I because curious about artists’ opinion and thoughts on the archive they create through their art practice. I am thinking of archive not in the colonial dusty way but the way the accumulation of items, footage, digital files tell one part of the story of artists work, histories and making. I am also considering the care of these informal archives that emerge from the work of media artists and filmmakers, and how these archives act as sites of memory, learning, and social histories important to First Nation Communities.

My art practice and research consider art as a mode of response and thinking, where processes of making through video, audio, animation, printmaking, digital tools, and socially engaged art generate new forms of understanding and reaching out, communicating, invoking critical questions about land and all living beings. My art practice often includes response to place, thinking through geographies as I relate to land and plants. I’m interested in intersection of geography and art, science, and art where walking and observation become part of creating artworks. I am interested in weaving in concealed histories and opening potential for imagining futures. Some recent work I have been incorporating storytelling and asking the listener/viewer/audience to suspend disbelief and indulge in imaginary states of being, of pursuing quests that invite looking at land from different perspectives. With a focus on Indigenous art and curatorial practices as scholarship, learning, research and collaboration, the core of this work is a commitment to art as a reciprocal process of knowledge building to invite conversation and thinking together.