RIVER DRAWINGS, RIVER NOTES
By
Genevieve Robertson

Studio Art Diploma, Capilano University, 2006
BFA, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 2009

A THESIS ESSAY SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF
THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
MASTER OF APPLIED ARTS

EMILY CARR UNIVERSITY OF ART + DESIGN
2016

© Genevieve Robertson, 2016

ABSTRACT

In this thesis, I outline a multimodal research project that investigates my relationship to the
lower Fraser River from Yale BC to the mouth and takes up methods of physical exploration,
conversation and drawing. My research questions include: As a fifth generation settler,
woman, artist and forestry laborer, how might I form a respectful relationship to land and
water in a moment of indigenous resurgence during the Anthropocene? And through
representation, how might I contribute to the construction of landscape as a cultural
medium?
First, I briefly contextualize both my positionality and the Fraser River delta area, and then
introduce a methodological framework that incorporates long-term place-based and
embodied investigations including walking and swimming, and conversations with
indigenous and non-indigenous people who share interests and hold knowledge about the
river. These practices have been influenced by an understanding of land and water as having
implicit agency and power far beyond their role as consumptive resources; and have been
guided by an ethos of respect and reciprocity that draws on ideas imbedded in many
indigenous research methodologies.
I then introduce a co-emergent drawing practice that is linked to site-based investigations by
the idea of wayfinding, and utilizes site-derived plant and mineral-based pigments. Included
is a description of artistic process and formal elements of the work, a discussion about
materiality as imbedded in ecological relationships, and a conversation about my choice to
use halq’eméylem place-names to both indicate where the pigments were found and to
honour the depth of cultural knowledge imbedded in the landscape of the lower Fraser River.
This thesis defines a practice that takes up formal image making while engaging in the
politics of place from a critical settler perspective. It describes a deep artistic investment,
guided by a cyclical and iterative engagement with land, form, material, language, theory and
intuition.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
To the Stó:lõ or Fraser River, for letting me in and helping me listen
To Verity Rolfe, Jay White, Lucie Chan and Randy Lee Cutler
For their guidance, excitement and conversation

To Sonny McHalsie for sharing stories with me,
To Laura Wee Lay Laq for sharing the Halq’eméylem language,
To my dad Nick for making me eat dinner
And to my grandparents for their belief and support

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“The better I know the New West the more my attention is claimed by the peripheral vision –
by the side-of-the-road-shows, by life on the land. I argue now for the nearby, a micro view of
land and art, grassroots connections rather than macro pronouncements.”
- Lucy Lippard

“Places are fragmentary and inward-turning histories, pasts that others are not allowed to
read, accumulated times that can be unfolded like stories held in reserve, remaining in an
enigmatic state, symbolizations encysted in the pain or pleasure of the body. ‘I feel good here’:
the well-being under-expressed in the language it appears in like a fleeting glimmer is a
spatial practice.”
- Michel De Certeau

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

2
3

SOURCE

7

Introduction: Positionality and Practice
8
Site: Stó:lõ and Colonial Context of the Fraser River Delta
10
Approach to Site: Orienting to a Respectful Site-Based Practice Through Methodology 11

CURRENT

14

River Catalogue: Drawing as Walking as Wayfinding
River Drawing: Understanding Water Through Embodied Experience
River Notes: Reflections on Drawing as Methodology

15
17
23

Drawing With the Land to Learn and Honour
Salal / Heart on the Chest
Skwiyó / Big Eddy, Stay Away
On Slowness and Vulnerability
On Scale and Temporality
Between Inner and Outer Worlds

23
23
25
28
29
31

MOUTH / CHUCHUWÁLETS

34

Conclusion: Towards a Recuperative Ecology
Onward: Drawing the Shoreline, Occupying the Edge

35
35

WORKS CITED
WORKS CONSULTED

37
39

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SOURCE:
A : a generative force : cause
B (1) : a point of origin or procurement : beginning (2) : one that initiates : author
C : the point of origin of a stream of water
The word source signifies both the origin of flowing water and the places where my work
begins. Over the last year and a half, I have been walking and swimming along the shores of
the Fraser River1 from Yale B.C. to the mouth and making drawings in response. This has
meant learning about elusiveness, witnessing, water, loss, Stó:lõ culture, local land and
resource politics and my own subjectivity in relation to these elements. This writing runs
alongside an emergent personal ecology2, and outlines the scope and potentiality of my
practice.
This paper is divided into three sections: Source is an introduction to my positionality,
practice, and research methodology and includes a brief contextualization of the Fraser River
delta area; Current frames the body of work I have produced and its theoretical, art historical
and material dimensions; and Mouth / Chuchuwálets is a conclusion that considers the
‘sediment’ I am taking forward beyond the program. The footnotes contain undercurrents of
research that substantively inform the project.

1 The Source of the Fraser River is nestled in the western Rocky Mountains near Mount Robson and

curves in an s-shaped arc towards Vancouver’s lower mainland and the Pacific Ocean, 1375 km away.
2 By this I mean my relationship to both physical surroundings and other living beings.

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Introduction: Positionality and Practice
The sense of home I feel in this local region is partially rooted in early memories of living in
remote forestry camps in southwestern British Columbia. There, my parents founded a
forestry co-operative, organizing and toiling in watersheds that feed into the Fraser River.
This intergenerational and geographical history has become my lived experience, as I spent
twelve years working in the forest industry in B.C. and Alberta. I witnessed the effects of the
resource extraction industrial complex manifested in the landscapes I labored in, and in the
cumulative effect of overwork and toxicity on my own body. I also fell in love with these
intricate and broken landscapes. My identity is traced with embodied memories of living and
working outside; the smell of dry pine needles in the fall, the sound of swollen creeks and
rustling birch trees in the spring, the sound of work trucks idling in the morning (fig. 1).

Fig. 1. My mother Verity and I, Western Reforestation cook shack, Squamish Valley, 1989

My relationship to the unceded lands of B.C. is therefore multifaceted, involving personal,
economic, health, territorial and ecological implications. It is this history that brings me to
my work, propelling me to seek new ways of forming a respectful and inquisitive
relationship with this region and the waters that run through it. Theory has become
intertwined with practice as a way of navigating the world. And yet the ideas in this thesis

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have not been reductively forced on the work, but rather assist in parsing out an ethical
framework in relation to place. This framework spans beyond the last two years. In 2013 I
attended York University’s Environmental Studies Graduate program where I was exposed to
radical research methodologies, environmental philosophy and embodiment studies. I chose
to come to Emily Carr because I needed to pursue these ideas through a visual, tactile
language rooted in studio engagement.
As a fifth generation settler,3 woman, artist and forestry laborer, how might I form a
respectful relationship to land and water in a moment of indigenous resurgence4 during the
Anthropocene5? And through representation, how might I contribute to the construction of
landscape as a cultural medium? Throughout this hybrid thesis project, I have built an ethic
and method for working which includes long-term site-based engagement, embodied
practices of walking and swimming, co-emergent community-building and conversation, and
a studio drawing practice that utilizes found organic materials. This is all couched within the
scope of an expanded drawing practice. Whether I am swimming or using charcoal, I see my
work rooted in drawing: drawing through the water with my body; drawing materials and
histories out of the sites I experience; drawing to learn, honour, process and remember, and
drawing as wayfinding.
Throughout this text sit three psychic spaces: water, site and studio. Being out on the
shoreline is the root of research and I see the land and water as collaborators, teachers, and
as emblematic of human power relations and conflicting values (Baum, 8). Starting with
embodied fieldwork I bring place-based knowledge and collected findings into the studio,
where my work is derived from an emergent, intuitive sensibility of materiality and simple
form, and investigates the matter under my feet and around my body: water, oil, mud, flora,
fauna and mineral (fig. 2). The space between politics and aesthetics is generative, and I
aspire to make formally resolved images while grappling with unresolved issues of
biodiversity loss, resource extraction and settler roles in decolonization.
3 Of European descent
4 Although many indigenous people and allies are working towards decolonization through struggles
that re-negotiate aboriginal rights and title and land sovereignty, it cannot yet be said that we are in a
‘decolonial time’ because of the dominance of settler-colonial power structures and dominion over
land. My understanding of decolonization draws on the text Decolonization is Not a Metaphor, by Eve
Tuck and Wayne Yang.
5 Defined as a new geological epoch during which human activities have had an environmental impact
on the Earth, which some scientists argue started after the industrial revolution.

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Fig. 2. Pit / Found oil sand on paper / 10”x10” / 2015

Site: Stó:lõ and Colonial Context of the Fraser River Delta
I want to acknowledge that although my artistic gestures are relatively discreet, the
geographic scale and cultural context of the Fraser River delta area is vast and diverse; the
river is at once perceived as an ecologically valuable natural resource, an industrial highway,
and the heart of a spiritual cosmology. I am coming to understand the layered
spatiotemporal relations that take place on the river, where intricate local narratives of both
subordination and self-determination6 interact with global patterns of commerce7.

6 For example, the Stó:lõ Xwexwilmexw Treaty Association are in the middle of a territorial treaty
process that will re-grant aboriginal land rights and title and self-government. (McHalsie, oral
interview)
7 The river is used industrially for coal, gravel and lumber transport and processing, commercial and
sports fishing, and is the site of various contested resource proposals, including the proposed
expansion of the Kinder Morgan crude oil pipeline route, the Delta Port 2 and Fraser Docks coal
terminal, the proposed Tilbury Island Wespac/Fortis BC LNG plant, and a jet fuel terminal and
pipeline in South Richmond. According to Mathew Evenden in Fish Versus Power, the Fraser River is
also the most productive salmon run in the world, although development threatens this food security
(16).

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The Fraser River delta area is unceded territory of the Stó:lō and Musqueam people, who
since time immemorial, have been its hereditary caretakers. I walk and swim on the shores of
the river with the understanding that my presence is a privilege, not a right. I acknowledge
that in choosing to work in relation to this area, I am engaging with a series of histories and
associations: with the river as a culturally significant, spiritual place to the Stó:lõ and
Musqueam people8; with local and global histories of conquest through the imposition of
hydraulic order over rivers9; and with representation of land as an ideological tool in the
process of colonization. Direct and representational elements of the project of imperialism
have effected the Fraser River delta area and the Stó:lõ and Musqueam people in countless
ways: systemic stealing of aboriginal rights and title through reserve creation, practices of
renaming land, exploitation of natural resources, destruction of sacred and culturally
significant sites10, and institutional systems of display that render indigenous cultures only
visible through the narrative of obsolescence, to name a few. Although I do not claim to
attempt an undoing of any of these histories, I aim to avoid reifying these power relations
through representation, practice or otherwise.
Approach to Site: Orienting to a Respectful Site-Based Practice Through Methodology
I have been influenced by indigenous research methods and ways of knowing and
articulating relationships to land and water. Rather than an act of appropriation, this
approach responds to my desire to find an academic language that articulates a more
multidimensional relationship to land than what I have found in the Western canon.
Relational accountability, an important element in many indigenous research methodologies,
privileges the importance of creating healthy and mutually beneficial research relationships
with all human and non-human participants and collaborators11, including the land12.

8 The Stó:lõ People (which, by some, is contested as a cultural or ethnographic construction) make up
a diversity of collective identities and affiliations, with histories of both conflict and friendship, sharing
a multitude of overlapping dialects (Carlson, 17).
9 The imposition of hydrological order over rivers is taken up throughout Simon Schama’s “Streams of
Consciousness” section, in Landscape and Memory.
10 Including but by no means limited to: the draining of Semá:th, or Sumas Lake in 1928, the
destruction of the historic town site and burial site in Musqueam known as c̓ əsnaʔəm, and the
destruction of the 9000 year old archeological sites at Glenrose Cannery and St. Mungo due to the
construction of the South Fraser Perimeter Road in Surrey.
11 I will address human relationship building later in this document.

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Indigenous scholar Shawn Wilson, in Research is Ceremony discusses pedagogy of place,
articulating that the land can be the epistemic base and the active agent in research
axiologies. The environment is the knowledge, in other words, and we are accountable for
upholding our relationship with it and being sensitive to it. In Wilson’s account, “the
distance or relationship between ourselves and the environment is sacred, and so you do
ceremonies to bridge that space or distance” (87). My practices of swimming and walking
seek to engage with that distance in a generative way that lays the foundation for a
relationship with land, and leaves room for the experience of the sacred. This relationship
engenders a sense of accountability to the river: to engage in thoughtful, nuanced art making,
to leave no damaging trace, to sustain a long term investigation, and to witness and humble
myself to its waters and to the stories I learn through research. The river has had an ineffable
affect on my work and being; I have listened to it and it has talked back, influencing my
movement, material choices, and approach to encounter with it.13

12 This sense of accountability is articulated throughout Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonizing
Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, and in Jay T. Johnson and Soren C. Larsen’s A Deeper
Sense of Place.
13 The idea that the land talks back, or keeps track of you, is resonant and was initially introduced to
me through Keith Basso’s Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache,
where an apache elder describes, “The land is always stalking people” (38).

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CURRENT:
A: the swiftest part of a stream or river
B: flow marked by force or strength
C: a tendency or course of events that is usually the result of interplay of forces
D: happening or existing now: belonging to or existing in the present time
E: used as a medium of exchange
This section contextualizes the thesis exhibition, placing it in relationship to past work,
theorists and artists. Through the use of the word current, I invoke water and movement but
also suggest that respectful artistic engagement with land, while always important, is
especially the case now.

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River Catalogue: Drawing as Walking as Wayfinding
In January 2015, I began walking along the river and making images in response, creating a
gridded series of drawings called River Catalogue (fig. 3). This was a time of searching,
orienting and gathering. The images I made were simple and their creation enacted a form of
wayfinding, defined here as a process that humans and animals use to orient themselves in
real or psychic space and navigate from place to place. This wayfinding was taking place on
the river and in the studio.

Fig. 3. River Catalogue / River water, found charcoal, gouache and found oil sand on paper / 84” x 60” / 2015

In Line: A Brief History, Social Anthropologist Tim Ingold links drawing and physical
movement together through a conception of the line, as a mode of marking gesture, presence
and engagement, whether an additive mark on paper or a subtractive trace made by
movement through the world. In his text Being Alive, Ingold writes, “The practice of drawing
has little or nothing to do with the projection of images and everything to do with wayfaring
– with breaking a path through a terrain and leaving a trace, at once in the imagination and
on the ground, in a matter very similar to what happens as one walks along in a world of
earth and sky” (179). In this way, Ingold frees the representation of landscape from the
scopic regime of disinterested observation, and reasserts the etymological root of the word

15

‘scape’, meaning ‘to shape’14 (126). This relationship between drawing and walking through
the world assists in linking my embodied work as cultural practice with the idea of landscape
as a cultural medium. Through River Catalogue, I explored representations of landscape that
exposed a reflexive and ongoing engagement with place and went beyond familiar typologies
like the sublime, picturesque, romantic, pastoral and exotic. The production of River
Catalogue was a process of both orienting and recall. As I came to know the river through
physical exploration, I created a taxonomy of symbolic and mimetic forms, while following an
impulse to collect and organize. This work relied on a gridded display structure. I have since
moved away from the grid because of its rigidity: its use in the social sciences as a taxonomic
tool; its reference the post-industrial landscapes that emblemize Western progress; and it’s
capacity to neutralize or inoculate potentially powerful imagery.

Fig. 4. Studio documentation of process material / Banff Centre / 2015

14 In Landscape and Power, theorist W.T.J. Mitchell further demonstrates the possibilities for
conceiving of landscape as a verb: “What we have done and are doing to our environment, what the
environment in turn does to us, how we naturalize what we do to each other, and how these ‘doings’
are enacted in the medium of representation” (2).

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However, during this time the grid was helpful as I collected both human-produced and
natural objects, organic materials, photographs, notes, sketches and words15, which became
the basis for work (fig. 4).
At the same time, I began using natural site derived substances in the drawings, evoking a
direct connection between site and studio (fig. 5). These pigmentation and material
processes have continued to influence my working methods.

Fig. 5. Pool / From River Catalogue / 10”x10” / River water and gouache on paper / 2015

River Drawings: Understanding Water Through Embodied Experience
River Drawings is a 20-minute video documentation of a durational practice of swimming in
the Fraser River, in both urban-industrial and rural areas close to the mouth (fig. 6). This longterm embodied exploration is fundamentally a form of drawing and knowledge-production;

15 Such as bramble, cloud, coal, dam, dust, gravel, oil, pit, plume, pond, metal, tap, water, wind, and

wood

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my body becomes a conductor for understanding the experience of entering a habitat that is
not my own, the force of the water and its ever-shifting currents, and the effect of resource
industries on the river’s ecology. This work takes me to interstitial spaces where animals live
precariously between the industrial activity of a resource economy and a toxic shoreline. The
rope that I am using as an anchor has been collected and knotted together as I walk along the
shoreline. It is at once a physical and psychological safety measure, a drawing implement, and
an accumulation of knotted histories recording my repetitive gesture of swimming. Through
this work, I learn to read the sounds that can be heard and felt under the surface of the water,
the limits of my body as substrate, and the feeling of stepping barefoot into stinky shoreline.
This muck is a coalescence of slick silt deposits, toxic particles, engine oil, and decomposing
organics: a sedimentary of the Anthropocene in the making.

Fig. 6. River Drawings / Video Still / 20 minute looped video / 2015

This practice came as a response to many months of walking along the shoreline of the Fraser
River delta and making drawings in response. I was finding the process to be belabored and
inconclusive; I was often thwarted by one thing or another. Swimming allowed for a more
direct encounter with the river itself. The practice of trying to ‘know’ a vast stretch of water
through experience is at times absurd and at times powerful. In the act of swimming attached
to a rope, there is both a silliness and a pointlessness that I interface with every time I walk
and fumble through the mucky, murky water and out to the depth where the current begins to
pull at my body. I feel silly again at the moment when I get to the end of the rope and start

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pulling myself back, having accomplished nothing tangible except for reaching an arbitrary
end.16 The swimming practice also allows for an experience of awe. The river is frighteningly
large and surges with fast kinetic energy; the water is cold, my rope is tenuous. It is my aim
that the swimming work communicates both of these perspectives, as well as opening a
conversation about vulnerability and power in relation to the body, water and industry.
An understanding of place builds on the generative legacies of thinkers like Henri Lefebvre
who articulates a relationship between space and power, where space is not simply a
container but is produced by human activity and shaped by the power relations therein, and
Doreen Massey who brings forth an interpretation of place through identity politics and
gender studies. However, my practice is most directly informed by what Michel De Certeau
calls narrative delinquencies that, through direct inscription of the body on order (or land),
work to disrupt or interrogate established systems of spatial and material power upheld by
dominant narratives. Here swimming is an active form of spatial research, a strategy for
locating myself within the landscape and water. I am immersed in the grittiness of the
shoreline, in contrast to the scopic experience of an industrial environment translated
through a panorama of infrastructure, technology and rapid movement, “whose condition of
possibility is an oblivion and a misunderstanding of practices” (Certeau, 233). This can be
related to the experiential difference between speeding over the Port Mann Bridge in a car,
removed, verses bushwhacking through muddy and weed-choked Canadian Pacific Railway
property in order to get to a swimming site. I am a female body in a male dominated
industrial landscape17, a vulnerable body surrounded by elemental and human-produced
forces, an unusually placed body seeking out a narrative that moves in opposition to
normalcy, and a curious body, moving through a foreign and complex habitat while
witnessing the site and listening to its story (fig. 7).

16 Another element of this work that I am engaged with is that of relentlessness and the practice of
making art. It seems that I have come to a point where I need to regularly plunge myself into dirty, cold
water in order to make drawings.
17 While swimming and walking on Mitchell Island, an industrial area used for the processing of
concrete and lumber in South Richmond, I did not see another woman all day. This is often the case
during my excursions into industrialized areas of the river, both on and off shore.

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Fig. 7. River Drawings / Video Still / 20 minute looped video / 2015

The production of River Drawings has necessitated a coming-to-know of water as both an
elemental force and a cultural metaphor. Feminist, anti-colonial thinker Astrida Neimanis
asks:
How might paying attention to water – really paying attention to it, its movements
and relations, its vulnerabilities and gifts, what it does and how it organizes itself and
other bodies – open up a different sort of imaginative space, perhaps opening up
some of the foundational concepts and beliefs in dominant Western systems of
thought that I have inherited? (68).
My embodied experience in the Fraser River has led to a nuanced reconsideration of the
dominant belief that water is simply a resource. This informs water’s invisibility,
unknowability, and ‘feminine’ position in western binary oppositions: mother, fluid
conductor, gestator, communicator, and memory-keeper. Neimanis claims these conceptions
lead, in part, to its cultural invisibility and undervaluing. The Fraser River snakes invisibly
through the city, although it is the fundamental reason why human settlement exists here. In
What is Water?: A History of Modern Abstraction, Jamie Linton posits that our modern
perception of water is limited, and “overcoming the hegemony of modern water involves
changes in how we think about water, as well as how we represent, manage, distribute, value
and use it, for all of these are closely related” (13). By making the river (and myself) visible, I
hope to articulate water as something more than solely a consumable resource.

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Thinking about the artistic legacy that River Drawings is inspired by, I must acknowledge but
move beyond the historical tradition of spatial practices burdened by modernism such as the
work of Richard Long. Instead, I am interested in the role and resurgence of spatial practice
in contemporary art, where the ubiquity of these practices emblemizes an appeal for
geopolitical and territorial engagement, a desire to come to know localities and histories
through embodied practice.18 For the purposes of this paper I will focus the discussion
through Anishinaabe-Canadian performance artist Rebecca Belmore’s Fountain.
Fountain, a video piece that was projected onto a screen made of falling water at the Venice
Biennale in 2005, took place on Iona Beach on sacred Musqueam land, at the mouth of the
north channel of the Fraser River, which is the convergence of logging industry, a sewage
treatment plant, and the international airport. Belmore is seen struggling in the cold water
just off shore with a bucket. She then walks towards the camera and heaves the contents of
the bucket directly at the lens. At this moment, the liquid in the bucket is revealed to be
blood, and Belmore’s face is seen through a curtain of red liquid as the video piece ends (fig.
8).

The Figure has been removed because of copyright restrictions.

Fig. 8. Rebecca Belmore / Fountain / video still / 2005

Foundationally, there is overlap between the geographical and material specificities of our
work but the reading of their discrete components and implications are very different: an
indigenous female body and a white female body; a struggling, aggressive act and a looping
act without an obvious goal. At the heart of both projects is a desire to ‘know’ and interact
18 This is elucidated through the work of artists like Klara Hobza (Diving Through Europe 2010-2040)

and Gina Badger (Mongrels 2011).

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with water as an element with agency and force. Here, I want to acknowledge that lively
materialism has had a place in indigenous thought long before Object Oriented Ontology
became a fashionable academic theme, with its goals to undermine an anthropocentric postEnlightenment intellectual tradition rooted in human primacy (Horton, 17). In Beyond the
Mirror: Indigenous Ecologies and ‘New Materialisms’ in Contemporary Art, Jessica Horton and
Catherine Berlo outline the myriad ways in which a restoration of material thought might
assist in moving us towards environmental justice:
The ecological promise of these ‘new materialisms’ is to invite a dialogue among a
wider host of agents, imagining a profoundly relational world in which humans
interact with, rather than act upon, others. Indeed, we maintain that grasping
multiple forms of liveliness has implications for the questions of global
environmental justice in raising the possibility of an ethics that binds not only the
affluent and the poor, colonizer and colonized, but all the material entities upon
which all our livelihoods depend (Horton, 18).
Horton and Berlo assert that Belmore’s Fountain grants water the agency to push back,
reminding people of their precarious position in a relational world, and indeed confronting
them directly with colonial violence and the dire environmental realities we face. Although
the repetitive gesture of River Drawings does not force water to be read so directly as a
material agent, water becomes a main character as I repetitively enact an effort to meet it.
Belmore’s work is often produced through a repetitive gesture that points, often explicitly, to
loss: loss of land, ecological sustainability, self-determination, identity and language through
processes of systemic dismantling. This loss is often articulated very directly in her work.
Similarly, longing or loss echoes through my practice, though expressed in a gentler way and
experienced on a very different scale: a failure in representation, a struggle to remember and
articulate through process, the abjectness of industry, the remains or afterimage of exploitive
action, and perhaps an ineffable loss that comes from a cultural disconnection and attempt to
reconnect with land. It is my hope that both River Drawings and River Notes contribute to a
discourse around water, loss and the politics of place.

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River Notes: Reflections on Drawing as a Methodology

Drawing with the Land to Learn and Honour
River Notes, the drawing series that made up the final thesis exhibition, was produced with
gouache, gold, and found coal, tar sand,19 Fraser River water, silt, charcoal, and natural plant
and berry pigments. Each drawing is centered and contained within the edges of the page in a
traditional figure to ground relationship, which adds to the symbolic properties of the organic
and elemental forms. The series is informed by my earlier drawing methodology where the
logic of making was guided by a cyclical process of wayfinding, both on the land and in the
studio. What emerged through this new series, however, was a methodology that included
more implicit knowledge-production and honouring of specific places, stories and materials.
By this I mean that the creation and research for a drawing took me through a multi
dimensional learning process. The best way to describe this is to tell stories about specific
drawings.
Salal / Heart on the Chest
Salal / Heart on the Chest (fig. 9) began when I noticed an abundance of salal along the river,
and the simple beauty of its leaf shape. In June 2015 on a hot morning, right at the beginning
of the coastal salal berry season, I walked along Sts’a’i:les River, a tributary that flows into the
Fraser and is a very productive salmon spawning area. There I picked berries off dusty
windblown bushes, and later made jam and boiled some berries down to make dye. The smell
was dark, bitter and syrupy. If you smell the finished drawing now, you still get traces of this
musk.
As the salal dye drawing unfolded through trial and error, a reflexive process developed that
connected experiencing the plant along the edge of the Sts’a’i:les River, learning through
drawing with its pigment, and honoring its material origin through naming. In drawing with a
raw material, I learn about its sensual properties, its growing season, uses, and the sites
19 I initially collected the naturally derived tar sand on the banks of the Athabasca River, on another
walking project through the tar sands area in summer 2014. The use of tar sand fills a gap in our
cultural imaginaries; often invisible or demonized, oil becomes abstracted by layers of opposing
ideological rhetoric. Our slippery and un-codified relationship to it, as both substance and cultural
operator is paralleled by the abstraction we are faced with when attempting to understand the
contested geographies between extraction and shipment or departure and destination, of which there
are several on the Fraser River.

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where it grows.20 I find it generative to think of natural materials as dynamic and relational, in
constant flux between coagulation, dispersal and entropy. As a maker engaging with
substances and their relationships to one another, I am caught in the currents of the lifeworld. In Materials Against Materiality Tim Ingold writes:
The properties of materials, regarded as constituents of an environment, cannot be
identified as fixed, essential attributes of things, but are rather processual and
relational. They are neither objectively determined nor subjectively imagined but
practically experienced. In that sense, every property is a condensed story. To
describe the properties of materials is to tell the stories of what happens to them as
they flow, mix and mutate (13).
In the case of Salal / Heart on the Chest, material and processual engagement went beyond
paper and salal berry dye. In order for dye to take to cellulose or plant-based fibre, I learned
that one must apply tannin, which “animalizes” the cellulose fibre, allowing it to act more like
a protein or animal-based fibre, which bonds more easily to the plant compounds. Through a
slow heating and layering process, I then added a mordant, which causes the dye to “bite” the
paper, chemically binding the two materials. Working back into the completed dye-drawing
with delicate pencil crayon marks, I experienced this process as one of paying attention and
giving time to the drawing as a form of honouring its form, the place it came from, and it’s
material elements.
Around this time, I went out to visit Stó:lõ cultural advisor and archivist Albert ‘Sonny’
McHalsie, who was kind and generous enough to take me out on the land and share stories
about Stó:lõ transformer mythology and the meaning behind some Halq’eméylem placenames. This experience was very meaningful. Several of my drawings reference specific places
and times along the river. To honour the depth of history and identity formation that is
embedded in these places, I engaged in dialogue about using Halq’eméylem place-names to
inform the River Notes titles. Salal / Heart on the Chest refers to the place-name for the
Sts’a’i:les River area where the berries originated, which means heart on the chest, beating
heart, or laying on the chest. This name refers to a large rock in the river that creates rhythmic
splashes at the tempo of a heartbeat. Although the drawing was almost complete when I
20 This knowledge is gathered through direct experience and through reading Nancy Turner’s Ancient

Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge: Ethnobotany and Ecological Wisdom of Indigenous Peoples of
Northwestern North America, and Plants of Coastal British Columbia, by Jim Pojar and Andy
MacKinnon.

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learned this, there is a formal connection between Salal / Heart on the Chest and a heart.

Fig. 9 Salal / Heart on the Chest / Tannin, mordant, pencil crayon and salal berry dye
(Collected at Sts’a’i:les, *heart on the chest, beating heart, laying on the chest), on paper / 35” x 48” / 2016

Skwiyó / Big Eddy, Stay Away
Skwiyó / Big Eddy, Stay Away (fig. 11) was produced with river water, silt and gouache. I
collected the water using a battered tin bucket I found on the shoreline. It was a cold morning
in a tight canyon just south of Yale. The water level was high and churning with froth and
wood debris from upstream. I was on a mission to find the place where the historic slide of
1914, created by accident during the building of the Canadian Northern Railway lin to the
coast, had impeded the spawning and wiped out thousands of Sockeye salmon. I was
misguided about the location, and it wasn’t until I met Sonny McHalsie that I learned the slide
was much further up the river, and that I had been across from Skwiyó, meaning big eddy, stay
away. The powerful circular counter flow movement of eddies had previously fascinated me.

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When I learned about this place-name, I decided to do an eddy drawing using the water from
that day, and using silt collected at Chuchuwálets, meaning the Fraser River (way out at the
end), the mouth of the Stó:lõ. The drawing was created by rolling water and silt continuously
around the paper. This gesture mimicked the movement of an eddy, and slowly formed an
edge or membrane. I am invested in how this image reads as both micro and macro: a cell and
an eddy simultaneously.

Fig. 11 Skwiyó / Big Eddy, Stay Away / Gouache, charcoal and found silt (collected at Chuchuwálets * Fraser River, way out at the
end, mouth of the Stó:lõ), and river water (collected near Skwiyó* Big eddy, stay away) on paper / 35” x 48” / 2016

Although these multi modal forms of drawing-as-knowledge-production are not wholly
legible in the final exhibition of the work, it is my hope that the material engagement and the
titling that references it offers a way of accessing the drawings that links them explicitly to
site.

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Salal berry dye, collected at Sts’a’i:les
Heart on the chest, beating heart, laying on the chest
Wild blueberry dye, collected on Mount Chiyo:m or Lhílheqey
Always wild strawberries
Charcoal, collected in Semá:th
Thick grass, level place lake, lost lake
Silt, collected at Chuchuwálets
Fraser River (way out at the end), mouth of the Stó:lõ
Oregon grape root dye, collected at Seq’á:m
Split, divide
Processed coal, collected at the Fraser Surrey Coal Docks
Water, qó, collected at Sq’oyi:m near Skwiyó,
Big eddy, stay away
Water, qó, collected near the Stawberry Island eddy Kwetl’twotl’thetows
Water jumping
Oil sand, collected on the Athabasca River
Goldenrod dye, collected near Qwequatchem
Echo, holler and hear your voice, answers you

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On Slowness and Vulnerability
During the production of River Notes, I reached out to several people and a series of
conversations and connections developed. These connections were often slow to form, could
not be pushed faster than was natural, and required some vulnerability to engage in dialogue
across disciplines and cultures. In addition to several sturgeon scientists, advocates and
farmers, I have been in contact with Environment Canada’s freshwater taxonomist Adam
Martens, who offered microscopic images of micro-invertebrates living in the water of the
Fraser. These, and accompanying conversations, have influenced my work and fed an
interest in microscopic verses macroscopic representations of land and water (fig. 11).

Fig. 11. Left: magnified image of the mite Frontipoda, Right: magnified image of a rotifer Keratella Coelastrium21

I have also received ongoing guidance from Brenda Crabtree, Stó:lõ and Nlaka’pamux artist
and Emily Carr educator, about local natural dying techniques; and Laura Wee Lay Laq, Stó:lõ
ceramicist and Halq’eméylem language instructor, about place-names and word
pronunciations; as well as Stó:lõ cultural advisor Sonny McHalsie. These relationships have
been very significant for me, emerging slowly as my work clarified. Sonny McHalsie and
Laura Wee Lay Laq have assisted me in finding the appropriate and correct place-names for
several sites. Sonny referred to this process as “oral footnoting”: by citing who passed these
names along, there is continuity in a lineage of knowledge. I also want to acknowledge the
conflict I feel about using these names as a settler and in an institutional context22. Doubt
arises about the appropriateness of using Halq’eméylem place names, and alternatively, the
21 Adam Martens shared this information with me via email.
22 There are other non-aboriginal artists who have negotiated this difficult territory, for example:
Christos Dekeakos’s 1990’s Vancouver-based Sites and Place Names photography project, and David
Campion and Sarah Shield’s 2008 photography project titled Memory In the Valley, which also engages
with traditional Stó:lõ territory, power relations and Halq’eméylem place-names.

28

reification of using Western place names if I don’t. This is complex and unresolved, which is
reflected in the titling of the works.
The social element of my work has taken up vulnerability: in terms of unsettling my own
settler identity through learning and bringing this into an institutional context; being
comfortable engaging with complex and unresolved issues; reaching out across disciplines;
and never expecting any particular outcome or timeframe. Vulnerability is also present in
the drawings themselves, which often simultaneously signify corporeality and biology.
Whether they read as body parts or botanical shapes, in their scale and simplicity, these
works are earnest and lay bare. I am invested in the potential for affect that this bareness
might generate.
On Scale and Temporality
Accompanying four large drawings (two of which are pictured above) were a series of smallscale drawings, exhibited unframed in a salon-style installation. Within this series, several
forms are inchoate and ambiguous in scale, oscillating between small material minutia and
large segments of land, engaging in the creation of both microcosms and macrocosms
simultaneously. A tension between taxonomy and topography then emerges; multiple
readings draw on botany, geology, territory, and abstract form (fig. 13). My interest in scale
and abstraction in relation to landscape is derived from embodied memories of moving
quickly through land while working, where one’s perspective is in constant flux between a
vast and intimate view of the land, a negotiation between obscurity and the pictorial. Through
disruption of a consistent scale, I seek to destabilize a fixed perspective, which has classically
indicated claiming ownership over territory whether through landscape painting or mapping
practices (Willems-Braun, 7). The salon-style installation of this series allowed the forms
more agency than they would have had in a grid, granting them the opportunity to assert
themselves as individual drawings rather than a collection, to be compared to one another.

29

Fig. 12 River Notes / Thesis Exhibition Installation Shot/ Emily Carr Concourse Gallery/2016

While disrupting a consistent physical scale, this series also suggests an inconsistent
temporality. Some drawings relate to specific historical events in the post-contact era along
the Fraser River, while others convey a sense of deep time (fig. 13). Perhaps more legible are
the works that reference geologic time and weather pattern: precipitation, deposit, debris,
sediment and strata (left drawing). The drawing on the right references the history of the
1858 Fraser River gold rush, or “The New El Dorado” and is constructed using gold leaf to
suggest fragments of a gold rush era map. The Halq’eméylem word for non-aboriginal
people without land title is Xwelítem, translating as “hungry ones” or “starving ones”. The
root of this word can be traced back to the gold rush, when many settlers and miners relied
heavily on the assistance of Stó:lõ people for their basic sustenance and survival. Xwelítem is
still used in reference to settlers today (Carlson, 2). It is drawings like these that lose their
contextual legibility when exhibited in a series. Letting go of their readability was part of the
exhibition process.

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Fig. 13 Left: Deposit / Oil sand, marine engine oil and pencil on paper / 18” x 23” / 2016
Right: Xwelítem / Hungry Ones / Gold leaf on paper / 18” x 23” / 2016

Between Inner and Outer Worlds
Many of the forms used in these drawings are iterative and have been generated through a
process of material engagement and intuitive knowledge-production in the studio. This can be
related, once more, to wayfinding. A formal and material thread leads me forward, each
drawing spilling into the next. A path is forged through the error of a failed drawing, the
afterimage of an unresolved form, leftover goldenrod dye and spilled engine oil. In
Technologies of Intuition Jennifer Fisher writes, “The term ‘intuition’, while commonly used by
artists, has been marginalized within art theory and criticism. Whether sensed as a gut feeling
or a flash of insight, intuition is a central process of ‘coming to know’ in aesthetic practice and
experience”(11). Fisher explains that etymologically, intuition is rooted in the idea of guide or
guardian, and of ‘looking within’. She articulates that intuition presents a reflexive and innate
form of knowing – an inner guidance that includes implicit insight. My making process is
sometimes an exorcism of forms that linger in mind or body, gathered on the Fraser River or
generated internally. Robert Smithson, in A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects (1968),
deftly articulates integration between land and intuitive cognition:
One’s mind and the earth are in a constant state of erosion, mental rivers wear away
abstract banks, brain waves undermine cliffs of thought, ideas decompose into

31

stones of unknowing … This movement seems motionless, yet it crushes the
landscape of logic under glacial reveries … The entire body is pulled into the cerebral
sediment, where particles and fragments make themselves known as solid
consciousness (100).
This merging of inner and outer worlds is very useful, in framing a practice deeply and
simultaneously invested in both.
For his engagement with both interiority and exteriority, I resonate with the art practice of
painter, drawer and printmaker Terry Winters. Formally, Winters is known for his consistent
use of simple figure-ground relationships, his use and collection of natural pigments, and the
organic and implicitly biologic qualities of his work. This calls up a visceral connection with
microscopic and cellular structures, as well as elemental, indefinable forces (fig. 14).

The figure has been removed because of copyright restrictions.

Fig. 14. Terry Winters / Untitled / Oil on Canvas / 78” x 98” / 1984

Curator Lisa Philips writes, “These were primal elements of the natural world – images of
things on the threshold of being, on the border between material and immaterial, between
articulated form and the inchoate” (17). I identify with how Winter’s drawings communicate a
tension between a field research aesthetic and visceral engagement, where scientific
objectivity and emotionality or obscurity collide. It is this edge between objective record and
the inchoate, or uncanny that I am interested in occupying with more intention in my future
work.

32

33

Mouth / Chuchuwálets:
A: The place where a stream enters a larger body of water
B: Fraser River (way out at the end), mouth of the Fraser River
C: Where the Stó:lõ meets the kw'ótl'kwa, meaning salt water
This section offers a conclusion to this thesis project, and outlines the nature of the ideas I
will be taking forward beyond the scope of the program. I conceive of the mouth of a river as
a beginning of something new, an opportunity for interacting with a larger community,
rather than an abrupt end.

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Conclusion: Towards a Recuperative Ecology
This thesis project has led me to investigations and places I could not have predicted, and
above all, has been a process of learning and regenerating. There have been times of struggle
as I re-asserted a drawing practice and fumbled through seemingly muddy water. How to
conceive and begin forming a respectful relationship with land? How to make
representations out of a visceral engagement with the material of the river? How to negotiate
the politics of place from a critical, settler perspective? This work has necessitated
acceptance and patience: an acceptance of the elusive nature of the river and of the questions
I am asking; an understanding of the temporal and physical scale that I am engaging with;
and an acceptance of the unpredictability of raw materials and processes of trial and error in
the studio.
Through this work, a recuperative ecology is developing. By this I mean: through forming a
relationship with the river, through reaching out to people who share interests and hold
knowledge, and through rebuilding a studio drawing practice, restoration has taken place. At
the heart of this thesis work is the formation of an ethos, a commitment to a life guided by art
and lead with respect for other beings. This is felt in the core of the body, and is the result of
a deep inquiry into my relationship with land and with the living fabric of the planet.
Onward: Drawing the Shoreline, Occupying the Edge
Through this two-year engagement with the Fraser River, I have come to think about the
edge, about the shoreline. The edge: as in marginality, as in hybrid, as in doomsday. The
space between two interacting materials; land and water, oil and silt, gouache and paper. The
shoreline: a charged line that traces the global interstice between land and water, a fecund
gestator of biodiversity, a wasteland. Much produced leaves via the shoreline, much washes
back up as unwanted waste. The shoreline is the substrate of global warming, the vibrating
indicator of change that we are all watching closely.
As a metaphorical site to explore form, the shoreline is very rich. During the making of River
Notes, something began to happen that I had not predicted. Certain drawings began to take
on energy between playful and uncanny, innocuous and dangerous. In my future drawing

35

work, it is this edge that I would like to engage with. I will propose hybrid forms, between
biology and geology, flora and fauna, toxic particulate and bacteria, waste and treasure.
Through this work I will ask: What kind of speculative ecologies might occur on the shoreline
as a result of tenacious forms of adaptability and survival? While using a visual language of
botanical or marine biological taxonomy, how might I allow drawings more agency to push
back, to express danger, to occupy the edge?

36

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