When the Heart is the Host
WHEN THE HEART IS THE HOST
Performance & Sharing Circle, Victoria, 2012. Open Space & Camosun College’s Artist in Residence program.
How & where do we invite others into our most vulnerable selves? Through visualization, drawing, ritual performance and dialogues I am asking who, how and where do we make space for others to reside inside ourselves? I created rituals as a way to understand how the body can be a host to the important people that pass through our lives. The memories, experiences, emotions and physicality of these people still live within us, yet it is often difficult to find ways to connect with them. This project emerged during a time of great transition; including my mothers illness, moving back home to the land of my childhood after living abroad in the land of my ancestors. I worked directly with traditional & ancestral lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish), səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) and Lekwungen peoples; still today unceded & known as Vancouver & Victoria. I created a practice of artistic rituals that asked the land to teach me – how to go inside, how to locate these guests, and how to connect more deeply with them and myself.
I shared my research as part of the Home Stay project, curated by Doug Jarvis. Through a series of Circle Ceremonies and a participatory exhibition, the HomeStay project will launch stories of hosting and revisit the etiquettes of being a guest on the territories of the Coast Salish Nation. Within this thematic frame, I proposed the heart & body as the site of guest and host relations & worked with Tahltan curator Peter Morin & Kwakwaka’wakw Elder Gerry Ambers to host a circle ceremony for invited guests.