Our Salish Sea
Sosan Blaney + Claudia Medina, Mieke Bray, Derek Georgeson, M. Simon Levin, Nadina Tandy, Kamala Todd, Clare Wilkening
This exhibition brought together works by artists living on the Sunshine Coast, sharing their stories of (and with) the Salish Sea. The festival, through art, sought to weave together environmental, cultural and social ideas as a means of inspiring our communities.
Robin Wall Kimmerer’s writing on the “grammar of animacy” has shaped this exhibition. She asks us to think of ecologies and environments as “kin” and not “things”.
“A bay is a noun only if water is dead. When bay is a noun, it is defined by humans, trapped between its shores and contained by the word. But the verb wiikwegamaa—to be a bay—releases the water from bondage and lets it live. “To be a bay” holds the wonder that, for this moment, the living water has decided to shelter itself between these shores, conversing with cedar roots and a flock of baby mergansers. Because it could do otherwise—become a stream or an ocean or a waterfall, and there are verbs for that, too. Water, land, and even a day, the language a mirror for seeing the animacy of the world, the life that pulses through all things, through pines and nuthatches and mushrooms. This is the grammar of animacy.”
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants
The works in the exhibition did not attempt to represent the Salish Sea, but reveal our relationships to this body of water that profoundly defines the place that we live in. The works in this exhibition asked you to be in relation – to the creatures that inhabit her, to the connections between the mountaintops and the estuaries, and to the legacies of colonial thinking that have turned her into a resource.
