ARTIST STATEMENT
Color and form are the building blocks of my art practice and connect me to my Piikani
heritage. As a Piikani visual artist, my influences are Blackfoot-painted lodges, hides,
and war shirts, as well as Blackfoot archaeology throughout Montana and Alberta,
Canada. The ancient human narrative of North America, and more specifically of the
Blackfoot People, has always fascinated me. Other sources of inspiration include
ancient sites, petroglyphs, pictographs, pictorial imagery, rocks, rock formations, and
glacial erratics.
My work often employs geometric aesthetics and contributes to an ancient yet
continuum Piikani narrative. It bridges the ancient to the contemporary, all while
creating visual color stimulation in my varied approaches to making art: printmaking,
painting, photography, and ledger drawing that utilizes antique ledger sheets and
documents. I am revealing fragments of time, history, and Indigenous abstraction—an
art form that has continued to survive in North America for thousands of years. My
work is bold, vivid, and has abstract minimalist qualities that are potent in meaning,
content, and place.