Tania Willard | Sensitized

×

Expand

Image Credit: Tania Willard, 2023.

In mid-August 2023, the Bush Creek East wildfire grew along the eastern shore of Adam’s Lake, creeping through Secwépemc territory toward Little Shuswap Lake in the southern Interior of British Columbia. The Neskonlith plateau, where Tania Willard lives and works, rises from the northern bank of the Thompson River, which feeds the lake’s southern end. In late summer, cottonwood’s leaves rattled in the wind, signalling how parched the earth was. For Willard, dawn and dusk were consumed by harvesting garlic, and her root shed was flush with bulbs strung up to dry. As a precaution, she gathered the soft filaments of fireweed seed and other highly flammable dried plants. One evening, a pyrocumulus cloud rose behind the hills to the northwest, and its dissipation cast a tawny haze. After a heavy rain, which quenched a long period of drought, the concentration of airborne particulate turned standing water the colour of rust.

The works in Sensitized bear witness to variable conditions on the land: from dewy sunrises to vivid sunsets, wildfire haze, threatening winds and miraculous rain. The exhibition features a series of cyanotypes and anthotypes, two forms of impressions made by exposing photosensitive emulsions to ultraviolet light. Willard made her anthotype base from blended wenéx (huckleberries), sesép (blueberries) and elderberries. The images feature local plants and photographs that Willard took of historical Interior Salish baskets (1870–1910) in the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies in Banff, Alberta. The resulting prints express the resilience of natural and cultural life under environmental pressures exacerbated by colonialism and capitalism. 

Sensitized also features a series of concrete poems the artist made with her youngest son by squishing, smearing and squeezing Oregon grape berries onto paper. Like the anthotype base, the berry’s juice is photosensitive and changes hue when exposed to sunlight and oxidizes. Many of Willard’s artworks continue to be sensitive to environmental elements after their completion. Unlike a photograph, which captures a specific moment in time, Willard views these works as “a moment of life on the land extends outward like a ripple in a pond embracing generations of interrelated life in an assertion of Indigenous futurity.”

During the 2023 Bush Creek East fire, Willard’s family and community were put on evacuation alert. They packed their belongings into blue Rubbermaid bins and relocated them to her studio in nearby Chase. Situated among piles of cedar roots, baskets made by Secwépemc Elders and family and photographs of her ancestor’s baskets, the bins resonated as vessels for aiding mobility in crisis and as safe repositories for one’s belongings. The resilience of Salish basketry is expressed in two sculptures with stitching patterns that she learned from master Secwépemc artist Delores Purdaby. A large-scale drawing of an Interior Salish cedar bark basket (1890–1910), held in the collection of the Whyte Museum, is featured in the gallery window.

The intensification of fire weather has various effects on the earth's metabolism: it disrupts photosynthesis when smoke obscures the sun, constricts respiration with high levels of particulates, and dysregulates cognition and motor function due to excessive heat. People are experiencing heightened sensitivity to these conditions, and yet appear desensitized to the economic and political forces that precipitate them. Willard ’s methodology calls for sensitizing on a broad scale. The cyanotype Future Prayers, is a sequence of prints made of tobacco leaves that she grew from seeds that were harvested at daphne, an Indigenous artist-run centre in Tiohtià:ke/ Mooniyang/ Montreal, Québec. Willard cures bundles of the tobacco leaves alongside the garlic in her root shed. The tobacco will be used for future offerings and prayers for the lives, homes and wildlife impacted by wildfires.