Catherine Blackburn’s newest body of work took her on an unexpected journey.
The Saskatchewan artist had created a piece of ‘futuristic regalia’ as the starting point for her next project as the nascent project began to take shape.
“I had completed one look for this body of work at the point of applying to Toronto Indigenous Fashion Week. I did it on a whim, thinking ‘what are the chances? I'm not a clothing designer.’ And I got in,” Blackburn said. “It was good in a way because it gave me a deadline to really get the ball rolling on everything else. I had to really push from there because I had about a year to prepare.
“It organically took form in a way that was unexpected. There were a lot of surprises in creating this work and part of that was the fashion runway show, which I am so thankful for.”
The result, after two years of work, is Blackburn’s “New Age Warriors” which opened at the Moose Jaw Museum & Art Gallery on Feb. 1 and will run through to May 5. While Blackburn had previously made jewelry, she had primarily exhibited paintings in galleries. Her new exhibit debuted at the Mann Art Gallery in Prince Albert in September.
Blackburn used Perler beads to construct the garments, head pieces and other regalia and then included friends and family wearing the regalia in photos taken by Tenille Campbell. After the pieces were worn in Toronto, they were also exhibited as part of the Otahpiaaki Fashion Week in Calgary in November. Video from that runway show is also part of the Moose Jaw exhibit.
Blackburn is of mixed Dene and European heritage. She was born in Patuanak — an hour north of Beauval — and is a member of the English River First Nation, but grew up in Choiceland. Her grandmother, Christine George, was an experienced beadwork artist, but Blackburn didn’t begin beading herself until after she finished her Fine Arts degree at the University of Saskatchewan.
Leaving Patuanak at such a young age, Blackburn said she was removed from many of the traditional teachings of her nation.
“It wasn’t until after university when I was navigating my way through my own cultural identity in my work that I found my good friend Kirsten Ryder and she taught me beadwork,” Blackburn said.
Ryder and Blackburn were partnered together working as youth workers on Ryder’s reserve in Morley, Alta. Ryder is one of the women photographed wearing the pieces in the exhibit. Working with Ryder was how Blackburn initially learned beading technique before her grandmother taught her some construction techniques.
“This work was born from her. This started as a memoir of my grandmother,” Blackburn said. "My grandma never would have thought of herself as a beadwork artist. She made pieces. She gifted work. That's a way of life for indigenous people. Adorning clothing was part of utilitarian wear -- to stay warm. For Dene culture it was about making a jacket that kept you warm while you hunted caribou. Adorning it an act of love for the wearer.
"That's really what I wanted to be at the forefront of this work. This is an act of love. I'm doing this for people. This becomes a gesture of honour."
Collaboration also became an important part of the process in creating the work.
Blackburn was trying to navigate what patterns she could and should use in her creations and found a resolution by collaborating with other contemporary Indigenous artists.
"Part of the challenge was that I didn't want to step into territory that wasn't mine and start borrowing from design that wasn't mine and disrespecting cultures and nations in that way," she said.
She began by reaching out to Alano Edzerza, a west coast artist who is Tlingit and Tahltan, and she created a high-collared piece based on his design called 'Birth of the Beaver Clan.’
“He said to me ‘I didn’t know it was going to end up looking like that!’ I told him, ‘neither did I!’” Blackburn recalled with a laugh.
Blackburn said all of the collaborations came together very organically and so too did much of the work. Among her other collaborators were Liss Stender, an Inuk artist from Greenland and Tessa Sayers, a beadwork artist.
She also honoured her grandmother who passed away during the process of making the work. A portrait of her grandmother is woven into the back of one of the pieces. Her grandmother had made her a pair of moccasins and some of the patterns and colour schemes from those are also incorporated into that piece.
“It was important to honour also my grandmother’s designs to some aspect,” Blackburn said.
The title cards for the pieces are frequently dated many years, decades or event centuries into future as “artifacts from the future.” There are streetwear and graffiti influences in the work and while it has a futuristic quality, it also deeply rooted in Indigenous culture.
"This work is very much speaking to a future and the next generation and it's made for that generation,” Blackburn said “It speaks to a past, it's in the present and it's informing the future. When I think about that, I think about the mark that we leave on this land, how temporal our existence is. That feeds into Indigenous culture and Indigenous ways of living and that adaptability, that utilitarian way of using land and how we live together within that relationship.”
That balance between creating something new and keeping it rooted in tradition comes across strongly in the work, but Blackburn said it was a real challenge to not make the pieces look gimmicky and not make them look like a costume.
"It needs to speak to a regalia that speaks to a future and it can't replay those same narratives of what we see today sold in stores. We need to break free of that," Blackburn said. "That's why I call these women 'warriors'. There's a constant fight, a constant battle to be seen, to reclaim space and how we see land, how we see treaty negotiations, how we see broken systems, how we see socio-economic marginalization. It's all of these things.
"This isn't a show rooted in colonial ills, this is a show rooted in pride and honour and reclamation and power.”
