New public artwork documenting Indigenous relation to the land installed this week downtown
March 2, 2023
Indigenous relation to the land in amiskwaciwâskahikan (Edmonton) is the subject of a new artwork, Sipikiskisiw (Remembers Far Back) by Michelle Sound, which is being installed this week at the Edmonton Transit Service (ETS) shelter located at 10020 – 100 Street NW. The transit shelter was recently renewed as the City of Edmonton works toward creating more safe, inclusive, and attractive public spaces for transit riders and the public.
Like Sound’s artwork often does, Sipikiskisiw (Remembers Far Back) explores her Cree and Métis identity from a personal experience rooted in family, place and history. Her artwork for the ETS shelter takes torn copies of archival images of an Indian Affairs Papaschase reserve survey map from 1899 and a photograph taken prior to 1907 of Indigenous men and tipis on the grounds of Fort Edmonton. The artist then mended the torn imagery using embroidery thread, caribou tufting, porcupine quills, and beadwork.
The rips in the images are meant to “show the colonial violence that Indigenous people have experienced, including residential schools, intergenerational trauma, loss of language, and displacement from our territories,” explains the artist in a written statement about the work. The mending of the images doesn’t fully obscure the rips, shares Sound, just as “the loss, grief, longing, and memory cannot be fully mended and the resiliency required to survive colonialism is also messy and fragile. These losses can never be fully healed but we can process our histories and realities through art, culture and stories.”
Commissioned in 2022 under the City of Edmonton’s new Public Art Policy, the Edmonton Arts Council worked with three local Indigenous artists/curators to select an artist for this project. Edmonton Arts Council’s Public Art Director David Turnbull said of the new policy, “it allows us to be flexible, responsive, and use curatorially-driven approaches to intentionally grow and develop a public art collection that is high quality, accessible, relevant, and representative of Edmonton’s diverse communities.”
Last fall 2022 we asked one of the curators of ETS shelter project, Emily Riddle, to reflect on the process and the significance of the public artwork by Michelle Sound in a guest article for the YEGArts blog. Click here to read the article.
