VIEWPOINTS

The Foreground is Blue
— Katherine Boyer

The horizon as a connection to time and place

I have grown up under a heavy canopy of blue. This blue above my head transforms; as the day matures, in the sticky heat of the afternoon that overtakes me, or when that sharp chill in the air casts an urgency in my bones that only a February in Winnipeg can. This is a blue that is deeper the higher you look and performs a seamless gradated dance downwards as it reaches to more delicately touch the world below. The sensitivity of this kiss between land and sky always exists elsewhere, in the far distance. That moment is intangible yet palpable; it is always just up ahead. My relationship and poetic consideration of what could be considered a basic natural phenomenon of space and perspective stems from my home and culture: the sky is an all-encompassing and expansive force in my home, the prairies. The sky contains knowledge, in the ways that the land does; the horizon line and vanishing point are always at a distance, moving with you, serving as a destination that can never be met or greeted. It also contains an analogy that speaks to my personal experience of culture, intimacy, and the built and natural environments that support us. These contemplations have woven themselves throughout my artistic practice. 

I am Katherine Boyer. My mother was English and grew up in rural Saskatchewan, Treaty 4 territory. She passed away when I was 19. My father is Métis, also from small town Saskatchewan, a carpenter/woodworker, avid cook, baker and collector. I was born in Regina, Saskatchewan and moved to Winnipeg, Treaty 1 territory, in 2016 to pursue my Master of Fine Arts at the University of Manitoba. I wear the paleness of my mother’s side on my skin, and live steeped in the privilege that this has woven throughout my life. As such, I have not always known myself – it has been under the guidance and through the support of my community that I understand and embody my heritage. My conscious cultural understanding of self did not develop until my mid-twenties when I met Judy Anderson at the First Nations University of Canada. Judy Anderson is a whirlwind force of kindness and generosity who would help to redirect my path in life and who continues to do so. There are many others, unnamed here but equally important, who have lifted me up, supported me, challenged me, and have ebbed and flowed from my life; you are appreciated, and I am grateful. It is with this knowing, this community and this care that I move through and see the world. 

In my work and research, I continuously affirm the experience of carrying multiplicities and various layers of time, as is enacted within Carry the Horizon With You. The structure is suspended, delicately balanced through a combination of carpentry, craft and the language of intimate touch. To be supported, the constructed horizon line of the two-by-fours requires cultural knowledge, in the form of a tumpline (a beaded strap to carry or haul), to be supported. The opposite is also true, the tumpline is activated by the bodies of wood: one cedar, one fir, standing for the varied experience housed in the range of tones of Métis skin. I live on the periphery of one end: paleness. My partner, also Métis, has darker skin. Our varied experience is palpable. The intimacy of meeting her and sharing core values in our relationship builds a foundation that is new for me. A meeting of mutual understanding forms a bond of closeness that feels vast. This too is a horizon. The moment of that understanding is akin to coming home: finding community demonstrates how the land and the sky can never be separated, and even though many of us live in urban centres, where the sky is slowly being preyed upon and capitalized, the sky remains the supporting backdrop to everything. This is how we Carry the Horizon.

The Métis have always been a very mobile group. Nicole St-Onge writes about the historical impact of mobility and the formation of identity and kin networks in Contours of a People: Metis Family, Mobility, and History: “There is a growing consensus among scholars that the key spatial expression of Métis life in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was mobility. The Métis economy resulted in spatial organization along networks of travel between specific locations for a variety of purposes” (St-Onge, 64).  St-Onge continues to explain that this resulted in the development of specific and individual sets of relations, particular to each Métis community. My experience of being from multiple places – born in Treaty 4, while also introducing my family as being from along the Red River and North Dakota – informs the feeling that these places are all home. This played a large role in why I decided to move to Winnipeg; to feel closer to one of those homes that contains significant Métis history, broadly and personally. The spread of community is not unique to the Métis, but the Métis have set a precedent for community spread in their homes and sites, the locations determined by weather and activities. Wintering camps and the Summer buffalo hunt are two examples of multiple and distinct homes. This way of being is founded on the cyclical nature of seasons, weather and the beings that occupy the land. As such, this has become its own framework for understanding the malleability of home and land, place and time. This history defies western colonial concepts of “home” or “place” and becomes entangled with the displacement of Métis families and the sale of Métis land to settlers. If mobility is historically tied to Métis identity, as St-Onge indicates, then we have always travelled with the horizon looking towards the future. Our movement alongside the changing seasons, below everchanging skies and conditions, is therefore part of our architectural fingerprint. 

The seasons shifting can be read in the sky. This knowledge is gradually found with each cloudless winter day, each pink and green tinged sky that can dwell in a spring evening before a storm, or when you wake up to sundogs herding the morning light. This is experienced knowledge, a first-hand knowing. Even within these expressions of knowledge, time is an integral part of understanding and positioning yourself. When standing at a site of great historical or personal importance, part of the significance of being present there is imagining the weight of another body that was once in this exact place, perhaps even standing in exactly the same space where your body occupies. The personal gravity of this event resonates because of the slowness of geological time (the constant yet imperceptible movement of land and nature, that makes land appear unchanged) in concert with the speed that the sky can change in front of us, which reminds you of your present-ness, and embodies your continued learning. 

Last year during the opening ceremonies of the Back to Batoche festival, my family and family friends were seated in risers in the stadium, waiting as the speakers were being introduced. The summer heat that year was cut by the periodic, but dramatic, downpouring of rain. As we were listening, my eyes rose and explored the intricate network of wooden roof trusses that formed the main structure of the wall-less building. I found myself imagining this ceiling as a net that was capturing and replaying the sounds of the ceremony below, the sound rolled and echoed around us from the large speakers booming with voices of continuous thanks and gratitude, the chatter and the laughter; the porousness of wood absorbing the sounds of that event and mingling with the previous years, sandwiched between each particle and fibre of living tree still left in those trusses. I could imagine the roof being peeled back leaving only the trusses but allowing the sound to now float upwards, only to be caught in what comes after; the sky. The containment and the natural cyclical systems of what we put out into the world is succinctly put by Fyre Jean Graveline in her 1998 book Circleworks: Transforming Eurocentric Consciousness: “That which the trees exhale, I inhale. That which I exhale, the tree inhales” (p. 57). The connection between breath, air and weather movement incites a feeling that the sky, which has a quality of constant change, is the very alive expression of our world or the “consciousness of landscape” (p. 143) as Rebecca Solnit puts it. Each variation and cloud arrangement is precisely unique to that moment alone, at its essence this quality is the visualization of the passage of time. To stand at a site with as much history as Batoche, and to look out at the sky while you have your feet firmly grounded, you are the revolution between the past and future. Your body translates all of our relations that have graced this land and have become us, to be present in this new timeline, looking out into the distance that is also the future. 

References

St-Onge, Nicole, and Brenda Macdougall, eds. Contours of a People: Métis Family, Mobility and History. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012. p. 64.

Graveline, Fyre Jean. Circleworks: Transforming Eurocentric Consciousness. Black Point, NS: Fernwood Publishing, 1998. p. 57.

Solnit, Rebecca. Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes For Politics. San Francisco, CA: The Regents of the University of California, 2007. p. 143.

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Katherine Boyer is a multidisciplinary artist whose work is focused on methods bound to textile arts and the handmade, including fabric manipulation, papermaking, woodworking and beadwork. Through the experience of long, slow, and considerate laborious processes, Boyer contemplates the use of her own Métis body as a conduit for building upon ancestor relations. 

Guest Editor: Tiffany Shaw-Collinge