Bonnie Devine

Bonnie Devine Artist Statement

 

I work in sculpture, installation, video, drawing, and painting. Both my art practice and the research that grounds it are either rooted in visual ideas that are developed either in the studio as the result of historical readings, or in-situ (on the land) in response to histories, stories, or legends that are embedded in specific locations. I am interested in the image making practices of my Anishinaabe[1] ancestors, and their occupation and dis-occupation of various sites. My work attempts to trace the absence of the Anishnaabek in these territories using the colonial mapping and claiming techniques that have strategically served to erase their history and the Indigenous methods of mark-making and mapping that reassert it.

 

Letters from Home is a series of four glass casts taken from molds I made on the pre-Cambrian rock of the Canadian Shield, which lines the shores of the Serpent River where I grew up. Each cast is the size of a large book, as if the story of the rock could be read, or it’s ancient history told through the rippled transparency of the glass. The casts rest on four wooden shelves made of birch, a tree that grows abundantly on the sparse topsoil of the Shield lands. I was interested in combining several primal elements in this piece: wood, rock, fire, and water. Wood and rock are referred to directly in the materials of the shelves and the glass casts. Fire is represented metaphorically in the intense heat that is required in the process of making glass and water in the ripples on the glass surfaces.

 

In 2013 I created a body of work for a solo exhibition, The Tecumseh Papers, about the great Shawnee (Anishinaabe) warrior Tecumseh, who led an alliance of Indigenous nations against colonial armies in the United States and Canada. Though Tecumseh’s resistance was ultimately defeated, his story lives on in the imaginations and aspirations of contemporary Indigenous peoples who continue to struggle for political and economic equality. A Dictionary of Names is a collection of 20 wooden panels, which depict Tecumseh’s family, allies, and enemies in pictures drawn on the torn up pages of a popular historical novel. The drawing style is derived from a pictorial tradition called “Ledger Drawings” which was used by imprisoned Indigenous warriors a hundred years ago, after the battles for North America, the so-called “Indian Wars”. The decision to record an alternative account of this history by drawing over a written English text was my way of reinscribing an Indigenous history that has largely been erased.

 

Letter to Sandy is one of a group of four diptychs created for the exhibition “Writing Home” in 2008. Each of the diptychs consists of a large format digital photograph on one side and a handwritten, hand-drawn panel on the other. The photographs were taken on the stretch of ancient rock beside the Serpent River on the Canadian Shield where I grew up. They record diverse mineral content, hint at primordial geological activity, and trace the dramatic contours of the rock that are visible there. The panels beside each photograph contain literary passages handwritten in dense graphite text, and the vestiges of maps, pictographic symbols, and machine-sewn cotton thread.

 

There is a story in the rock, not related to language or words but mute, elegiac, and undefended.

 

 

 

[1] The Anishinaabe (or Algonkian peoples) are one of most populous and widespread Indigenous linguistic groups in North America, comprising many tribes along the Atlantic coast, the St Lawrence River, and around the vast territory of the Great Lakes, including much of Canada east of the Rocky Mountains.

[1]The Anishinaabe include numerous tribes or nations: Ojibwe/Chippewa, Ottawa, Potawatomi, Shawnee, Illiniwek, Kickapoo, Menominee, Miami, Sauk, Fox, and many others.