SHAWN CHAMBERLAIN
I spend time drawing where I land my canoe, I offer tobacco, rest, and continue on to a spot suitable to make camp. The canoe has been a part of my own personal recreational life sincechildhood, and it is still the primary vehicle I use to access the land. The offering of tobacco and smudge have become regular practice for me before setting off on a trip, and when I stop to draw, I feel it is important to give something in return for taking something from the land.
A great deal of the work I do has a direct relationship to the lands I travel through, as well as the landscape’s influence on me. I am interested in how to approach landscape meaningfully and respectfully. To be aware of colonial histories imbedded within depictions of the Canadian wild.And not repeat modes of erasure in representations of an untamed wilderness. I have chosen the canoe as the material foundation of my exploration. The canoe is an Indigenous technology that has become synonymous with Canadian art and culture. The canoe itself is a cultural object and a work of art in its own right.
I see connections in the construction of a cedar canvas canoe to the history of painting in the sense that both involve stretching a canvas over a frame. My continuing work Confluence is a series of two- and three-dimensional paintings which explore these connections and intersections through materiality. As a builder of things, it is through materials that I best understand the world around me. I incorporate crafted wood elements which serve to bring the constructed, and the altered into the landscape; in an abstract way, the crafted wood brings the human into the landscape. It is a response to a type of Canadian painting that not only erases the Indigenous presence from the land, but erases all human presence, creating the impression of a wilderness free for the taking.
Though my imagery does not often include the human figure, the bent cedar forms, and shaped woods both echo the canoe, and offer a reinsertion of the human presence into the landscape through constructed or modified elements.
