Gellman, Mimi

Art-making in Indigenous contexts preserves cultural values, understandings, and frameworks and is uplifted through storytelling. Creating art and perpetuating cultural practices connect me to my ancestral memories, often drawing upon personal moments of joy, trauma, and self-determination. Questioning what is important and relevant is something that we each must choose for ourself and how we preserve the stories we make today for ancestors of tomorrow to recount. Sharing inspirations, creative processes, and journeys of exploration, allow me to express my story and commitment to my family and homelands. Experiencing, embracing, embodying, and empowering Indigenous knowledge, voices, and methodologies are systems I employ in activating customary mindsets in daily life. Acknowledging change through culturally grounded innovation allows long-held stories to persist and maintain connections to new adaptations and forms. Through these practices, I play my part in creating opportunities for the next generation to engage with the diversity and intricacies of my storied histories, places, and people. Perpetuating the values and cultural frameworks that allowed my forebearers to survive and flourish need to be lived every day, in turn providing opportunities for the next generation to be inspired. This is how I honor my past, celebrate the present, and safeguard the future.

This presentation is a part of a collaborative series between Emily Carr University of Art and Design (ECU) and OCAD University (OCAD U). The series explores themes around responsible conduct in art and design research. The Conducting Creative Research events were made possible with a SRCR Education and Training Support (SETS) Grant from the Secretariat on Responsible Conduct of Research through the Panel on Research Ethics (PRE) and the Panel on Responsible Conduct (PRCR) of Research on behalf of the three federal research granting agencies: The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

The impulse at the center of my practice is simple: I am longing for time that stretches out. I do not wish to spend time, buy time, save time, kill time, keep time. I want to inhabit time. This paper is divided into four sections. In Entanglement, I reflect on the capitalist time structures I grew up within, and how they inform my positionality and practice. I chart my encounters with Zenji Dogen and Carlo Rovelli’s writing, whose ideas challenged my assumptions about time, and compelled me to search for time’s expansive layers. In Unravelling, I write about my material practice. It is through embodied observation of changing material processes that I first glimpse time that cannot be contained by the capitalist boundaries of hours and minutes. Here, I examine the elements and methods of a key durational performance – Maintenance in Progress. In Threads, I explore three layers of time – earth time, saeculum time and ritual time – that I have discovered within my practice. In this section, I discuss the film, Laying Ground, which will be screened at my thesis exhibition. Finally, in Weaving, I write about not knowing through a current project, Watering Cracks, and reflect on my expanded relationship with time. I do not dive into detailed examinations of capitalist time in this paper, though I recognize my entanglement with it. I want to experience the qualities of time that arise from the earth’s cycles, from embodied rituals and from the life-spans of my durational works themselves. I do not want to define my work in opposition to commodified, linear time. As I have discovered through my practice, different times exist not in tidy binaries, but as complex layers within which we are enfolded.