New exhibition features works of three NWT artists

Dozens of Yellowknifers recently attended the opening ceremony for an art exhibition, It’s Time to Come Home, and met the people behind it.

Dene artists Jake Kimble, Laura Grier and Hana Steinwand now have some of their artwork on display inside the Yellowknife Visitor Centre.

Steinwand began beading as part of a university assignment. When her first design – a depiction of a wolf – caught the attention of friends, she felt inspired to make another one.

Although the project started as a way to learn the craft, she plans to keep beading until her work fills up one entire gallery wall.

“I wanted to stay connected with my culture while away from Denendeh,” she told Cabin Radio.

“Being in Vancouver, it was hard to be Tłı̨chǫ. So having that connection and that medicine through beadwork helped me feel like I was at home.”

Steinwand said some of the designs have decorative fringes hanging down that were inspired by her knowledge of creating fringe earrings.

She called flat-stitching a “huge learning curve” for her because it was her first time doing it.

“I did the wolf first and the bear second. In both of those, some of the beads stick out. I was kind-of doing a bit of a lazy stitch,” she said.

“If you look at the beaver, it’s much more flat and I spent a lot more time with each bead rather than just strings of beads.”

Steinwand said it feels amazing to be back home, reconnecting with friends and family, many of whom were present at the event to support her and her art.

“For me, this really feels like a starting point into a future of continuing to be creative and continuing to get myself out there in the community,” she said.

Grier was unable to attend the event last week. According to a description found on Grier’s website, their work is inspired by “the dynamism of Indigenous art practices and uses printmaking as a tool for resistance, refusal, and reflexivity.”

Speaking by phone from Toronto, Grier described herself as a Sahtu Dene artist from Délı̨nę who was adopted as a child and raised in Alberta.

She said she had spent time at the Banff Centre creating handmade syllabic type used for letterpress printmaking. She uses 3D printing and wood to laser-engrave northern syllabics.

The sentence that forms the inspiration for her work states: “When the lights turn on, that means it’s time to come home.”

“When I was finished printing my interpretations, I contacted my biological mother – who lives in Yellowknife – and I asked her how she would translate it,” said Grier. “And I had her translate that sentence for me, and one of the prints in that exhibition is her translation.”

“My entire research and artistic practice has been about this ongoing journey of being a displaced Dene who still has very much inherent roots to being Dene,” she said.

“It’s that struggle that you have of feeling alone, I guess. I use my artistic practice to go through, ideas, theory, lived experiences of urban indigeneity, but translate it through the form of printmaking.”

Kimble, who is originally from Hay River and lives in Vancouver, described the group show as a “little love letter to the North.”

Kimble printed five photographs of the North onto paper towel. The idea was to present how the material “soaks up” the land, knowledge and memory of the specific photographs.

One of Kimble’s works, titled Baba, features a closeup of their Ukrainian grandmother’s sofa.

“We don’t have access to fine art printers up north or fine art framers. I was thinking about how I can still make art up north even when I don’t have access to these things,” Kimble said.

Jasmine Nasogaluak contributed reporting.