Imagined Cartography

is an encaustic painting on  plexiglass created for the First Nations Garden at the  Botanical Garden in Montreal. It is now part of the permanent exhibition This Is Our Story: First Nations and Inuit in the 21st Century at the Museum of Civilization in Quebec city.  

This artwork is the culmination of a creative process, a gathering, a quest, a story told in a mural. Each panel symbolizes one of the eleven First Nations in Quebec, with the twelfth panel representing Métis and mixed-blood people. Together the panels form an imagined cartography of their territories. 

The story began with artists from the First Nations in Quebec who agreed to gather natural materials on their territories – branches, feathers, leaves, stones, seeds, nuts, pine cones, porcupine quills and needles, etc. The artists were also asked to write a word of their choice, in the language of their choice, on a scrap of paper. All of this was then sent to me. 

Infused with the sensitivity of each “artist-gatherer”, these materials were used as elements to create the mosaic. Using encaustic, a mixture of beeswax and damar resin, these elements were fused, engraved with heat and created an “original cartography” of our real and imagined territories. The words were inscribed to bear witness to the strong ties that bind humans, ancestral languages, territories and art.