Getting Old In The Hills // Tania Willard

An essay response to Audie Murray’s Old as the Hills.

Audie Murray, As Old as the Hills, July 31-September 12, 2020 at the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art

Audie Murray’s work first came to my attention in the form of a circulated Instagram image of a pair of sport socks with a beaded sole, Pair of Socks (2017). I immediately was drawn to thinking about these works, what does it mean to walk on these beads, to feel them on the feet- their potential to break-and how do they relate to historic works of moccasins with beaded soles? I was invested in the artist’s practice that I view as a mix of humour, skills-based material process and an intuitive sense. In another recent work, T.P. (2018) a roll of toilet paper is beaded with a dusty rose scalloped design that covers the entire surface of the tissue (a work that has become predictive of the global pandemic in 2020 and the rush on bulk toilet paper purchases!). A visceral materiality that lives in a bodily conceptual aesthetic is one of the ways I started to see Audie Murray’s work. This materiality is, at times, also concerned with a good laugh, an important healing belly laugh along with memories of laughter and who we share it with. In this exhibition, As Old as The Hills, these themes continue in the body of work on exhibition at Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art in Kelowna, BC (July 31- Sept. 12, 2020).

The medium of beadwork as a skills-based art form has blossomed in the last 15 years from important early works like Nadia Myre’s iconic beaded Indian Act, (Indian Act, 2002 ) to Ruth Cuthand’s beaded virus and pathogen portraits, the legitimacy of beading as a medium within contemporary art in Canada has been established and is represented in collections nationally. However, this need be contextualized within the persistent museumification of Indigenous art and the ways in which beading and other skills were and are attributed as craft or as low brow art and have yet to acquire the same legitimacy in critical writing and art history that white settler artist’s works in traditional western mediums like painting carry. The medium of beadwork in Canadian contemporary art can be attributed to Indigenous women artists’ and their important contributions to contemporary practice in Canada. In a recent survey exhibition, Beads..they̓re sewn so tight, at the Textile Museum of Canada, curator Lisa Myers states, “The materiality of beads and thread extends beyond the meaning of surface design. These artworks cover and conceal” It is in the conceptual explosion of this medium, this revealing and concealing that I locate Murray’s practice and it’s link to Indigenous resurgence; the important political, social and cultural focus on Indigenous rights, that has been with us since the struggle of our ancestors against the first colonists.

Material Study No.3; Red Rose Forever (2020) a beaded classic rose, in the iconic Americana style of tattooist Sailor Jerry, is mounted with insect pins on a piece of aged canvas attached to a small black velvet square in the gallery. This work speaks to me, it sees me and it has tea with me. I start my morning with tea, in the hills. I might say good morning to the last of the hummingbirds buzzing around the feeders or, the other day, there was a doe and its fawn in the backyard that I watched. These domestic routines that we have on our lands and territories are an act of everyday resistance. I see myself getting old in these hills in the most beautiful way, with hopes and dreams of Indigenous resurgence, represented by artists like Audie Murray, growing to become practice and tradition, living in the spirits of young people and the next generation, living embedded in skin as a mnemonic that reminds us that life is a circle of giving and offering, caring and care-taking. We need tea (and Red Rose is a mainstay in Indigenous pantries) to talk about that. Murray’s small beaded rose makes me think of tattoos sagging and blurred by age that reveal the beauty of the stories of our lives, our lives as a continuum of our ancestors and our lands with each resurgent act bringing more life, sharing more breath with the future. 

Alongside the red rose piece is Material Study No.5; Old School NDN, a quilled portrait of a Sailor Jerry inspired tattoo of an Indian or Chief’s head. This work is secured, with insect pins also, to a piece of leather or hide and then it’s velvet substrate. Recalling Americana classic tattoo design the work is re-appropriated by Audie Murray. In a process of resurgent Indigenous practice, we see the artists hands harvesting quills from a porcupine in the video work, Enn Modeuz, projected in the gallery. The insect pins used in both Material Study works also echo issues of the colonial collections, cabinets of curiosities and display of fetishizations and appropriations of Indigenous culture, pinned and trapped behind glass in the colonial museum. But, there is no glass here, no embalming of active culture, instead Audie Murray demonstrates a continuum of aesthetics and innovation from Indigenous and Métis lineage. These knowledges as contained in ‘material culture’ but not constrained by it. In the quilled work we see the dyed quills and the ways they have been positioned to create the iconic Chief’s headdress, but behind this the process is supported by a substrate of knowledge. Learning when, how and where to harvest porcupine, (roadkill at times), and then how to work with these quills in a way respectful to the animal. This Indigenous process-based practice is more than an artistic process and medium it is an integrated ecological approach to art making, one that always echoes back to the natural world around us and our ancestor artists.

I watch the full moon, because the weather changes after the moon, what is the calendar when you have the moon, what is the gallery when you have the land? These questions posed not as a binary but as an additive process of budding, transforming, and developing express the spiralling movement of Audie Murray’s aesthetic in this body of work that uses cultural iconography, Indigenous and popular, to tell us stories over tea. I am having tea with these works I am telling jokes to these works by calling this piece, ‘Getting Old in the Hills’, I feel like I can share a mature belly laugh about that with these objects, with Audie- Audie as a current form of her matrilineal DNA of all her mother’s mothers and all my mother’s mother’s-laughing at our labour and seeing the beauty, the absurdity and the humanity of it all. This makes me ask the question, can we even laugh through the violence of colonization? Murray asserts the power of laughter and humour in the adorned boxing gloves hung in the gallery. This work, kahneeokeesikopanis (2018), is backed by a sheet of copper hung on the wall over top of a smeared wall application of charcoal mixed with water. The gloves becoming both playful and deadly serious, supported by the conductive medicine of copper and smudge tell a story to me. In this story there is a showdown in the spirit world that has the spirits placing bets for Indigenous futurity. A memorial to defensive tactics, to the times we fight back and the sacredness of the drive to protect. We protect what we love, as Indigenous people we want so much back, because we love them all, all those things we have lost, that were taken, that had to be concealed to be safe.

Indigenous resurgence is described by Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer and scholar, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson as, “the rebuilding of Indigenous nations according to our own political, intellectual and cultural traditions.” she also refers to Indigenous creative practice as ‘world building’. It is in this act of creating futurity and potential out of trauma and loss that many Indigenous artists are engaged in and I read into Murray’s artwork. When we are missing our language, our ancestors, our lands, we look to traces like anthropological texts-we read between the lines, we read our own bodies as ancestral memory, we listen to elders and we build worlds from there. Our languages hold knowledge but so do our hands, our bodies and bones with echoes of antibodies to colonialism. In Audie’s exhibition, the hanging sheets of canvas fabric are marked with traces, icons and symbols; a buffalo skull, a snake, a whorl. These symbols become a language that have shrouded these gallery walls with shadows of instinct, memories encoded in our bodies and languages in our blood that mark out paths to resurgent futures. The process of the work equally speaks to the strategies of ethnographic refusal that scholar Audra Simpson discusses, in the way they reveal and conceal. In her process of making the work the artist uses beadwork she has created and coats it with a mixture of burnt smudge (sage) mixed with bear grease or bear grease with red ochre. After the beaded objects are coated she then pushes it into the canvas shroud to make impressions of the beadwork. They become fragments of readability that remain a lacuna of varied knowledge some more whole, some faint, but all of them with the relationship to the whole, the unseen and the protected. The names of these works: Buffalo that walks like a human, They have always been here, We are being cared for, and We dreamed we should be (2020) become incantations of these intervals, the spaces between each stitch, the vagueness of each impression is supported by an intention to intuit a path, a way-finding that is about the journey itself not a destination. And along this journey those buffalo’s, these medicine snakes encounter the pop cultural moment we are in. They hang above a floor piece that uses its own incantation of pop references from an Ariana Grande song that references the Savage, that longstanding trope and stereotype that has affected Indigenous peoples deeply over time.

In Audie Murray’s exhibition, pop culture interventions are a strategy to reveal concealed but persistent anti-Indigenous ideas within mainstream culture, revealing existing racism, subjugation, oppression and ongoing colonization. In the floor piece, Savage Sad Bitch Rug (2020) she again re-appropriates Indigenous cultural signifiers from pop culture, in order to re-contextualize them. The lyrics of the Ariana Grande song, Seven Rings, include the refrain, “Been through some bad shit, I should be a sad bitch, who would have thought it’d turn me to a savage” reinforcing the manifest destiny concept of the savagery and ‘uncivilized’, nature of Indigenous cultures and the Settler logic of our inevitable demise as justifying settler land resource theft and dishonoured treaties. The embroidered yarn in this piece infuses it with a craftiness that also becomes a gendered reading of the work, the work is laid bare in that the canvas shows mark making that are the artist working out the layout of the text. These small marks of process are shown throughout Audie’s work, nothing is too perfect, all works have an element of unfinished markings and in doing so they reveal a humility in the work. Humility is an important concept in many Indigenous world views, a humility, respect and humbling to the agency of the material has always been present in Indigenous practice. In western art speak it is referred to as materiality or object-oriented ontology but many of us grow up in Indigenous cultures knowing that when you work on beadwork or other skills-based art practices there are important teachings about how you embody the work. That intentions you set affect the work energetically and you need to be able to have a good heart when you work. Murray’s work has this good heart, these works continue a conversation started by ancestor artists who sit unnamed in collections around Canada attributed only to ‘unknown maker/artist/’ who continue to ask us to name them. Artists like Audie Murray continue to see their reflections through our ancestor’s worlds and into the pop infused global cultural moment we are in. 

Materiality is important in Audie Murray’s work, (a play on the anthropological terms of ‘material culture’ here), the materiality of her practice asserts its voice within resurgent activism accompanied by humour, protective instincts and transformative aesthetic, a medicine applied to appropriation. From small moments like the choice of insect pins and revealing the planning of the work in the marks left on the canvas floor piece or the greased impressions of the canvas shrouds and copper rods that support them her artistic choices thread a thru-line. A skin-stich tattoo that leaves it’s mark on all the works, threading through them leaving an inky stop motion of movement, land, skill, and humour that are cinched together to create a new piece of beadwork on a gallery installation scale. In my language of Secwepemcstín, I have learned that our word for bead, t.susúsu7t, comes from the visual of a dew drop on a leaf in the morning. I see these drops, these stitches of ink, and each bead as the morning dew, reflecting and refracting the actions of everyday resurgence. I sip my red rose tea like mother and grandmothers before me and know that to count these traces, each dewdrop, is an infinity, an infinite future of Indigeneity. 

Myers, Lisa, Beads..they̓re sewn so tight, exhibition catalogue, Textile Museum of Canada, Toronto, ON, 2019

Simpson Leanne B., As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis; London, 2017

Simpson, Audra, On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, ‘Voice’ and Colonial Citizenship. Junctures. 9, p 67-80, 2007.