Artist Statement

“Working across photography, cyanotype, textiles, beadwork, sculpture, painting, and installation, my practice explores the connections that bind people to ancestors, land, community, memory, and future generations. I am interested in how these relationships persist despite the systems that seek to fragment, archive, classify, or erase them.

Grounded in nêhiyaw understandings of relationality, my work considers what becomes possible when colonial, institutional, and archival frameworks are disrupted. Rather than positioning ancestors, land, objects, and memory as separate subjects, I approach them as active participants in ongoing relationships. Through material processes of transformation, I seek to reveal forms of presence that exceed imposed narratives of absence, loss, or historical distance.

Material plays a central role in this inquiry. Beadwork, cyanotype, textiles, found objects, and sculptural forms become sites where personal, cultural, and collective histories intersect. I am particularly interested in how objects accumulate meaning through use, memory, and care, and how artistic intervention can recontextualize materials associated with grief, surveillance, displacement, celebration, or survival. In my practice, land is not a backdrop but a participant, holding histories, responsibilities, and forms of knowledge that extend beyond human experience.

Across projects, recurring questions emerge: How do we remain accountable to those who came before us? What obligations do we hold to future generations? How might acts of making become acts of remembrance, reclamation, or relation? I am interested in the ways communities carry one another through grief, joy, disability, desire, ceremony, and change. My work holds these conditions together without seeking resolution, allowing complexity, contradiction, and tenderness to coexist.

My work is informed by Indigenous futurisms and by the understanding that the future is not detached from the past. Instead, futurity is shaped through memory, responsibility, and collective care. Ultimately, my practice asks how we might live in better relation: with ourselves, with one another, with those who came before us, and with the worlds still to come.” – bailey macabre, 2026