By Teresa Burrows

Behind our existence lies something else that becomes accessible to us only by shaking off the world.

(Arthur Schopenhauer)

Aborigines believe there has always been a labyrinth of invisible pathways, on the land and in the sky, that trace the footprints of the ancestors and initiate others to the ways of the world.  Where one learns to walk defines the journey. I was born in England but learned to walk in the Australian outback. The Aborigine believe every event, each person’s journey, leaves a record on the land and dreaming has been a way to creation. From the time I was young I was dreaming, and eventually the art in my head found a way to celebrate the paths of my life.

For the most part, art has been the adventure, but not always my path. I have graduated from a BFA program, trained as a printmaker and reclaimed myself as a painter. But after Jackson Beardy (celebrated aboriginal artist) encouraged me to go to his first nation home of Garden Hill to work (1981), the north embraced me and over the years my work – as the cultural programmer at the Friendship Centre, as a probation officer, addictions counsellor and as a mother – informed my dreams with new worlds and through the confidential confessions of others; worlds from the lives of others.

In many cultures, bones are the true storytellers, the original prophets. I have known stories of many reduced to bones, but two surgeries on my back in 1996 left me learning to walk yet again; this time in northern Manitoba.

Teresa Burrows collecting bones, 2009

For years I tried to define myself as an artist separate from my existence in the north. Maybe this northern identity is earned, but I have, in recent years, embraced the north and the media it affords my expression. As usual without a map, I have been wandering blind, as the landscape has taken my work from two dimensions into three, with mixed media and natural found elements.

As a visual artist I spent almost ten years on what I called drawings made up of dots. My paintings were large and complex like tapestries. My photo montages are equally labour-intensive with double exposed, accidently layered and digitally altered images choreographed together to make what I call photo quilts. And somewhere in between, while making elaborate “props” for what I wanted for the photographs and paintings, I realized that my mixed media works were already art. So over the last six years, I have been beading, almost daily, to realize a number of mixed media works. Beadwork has in a way become a new medium for my obsessive-compulsive tendencies.

Raven Ballet - The Unkindness of Nights Below Zero, Painting, 1999, 5 x 8 feet

Living 800 km from any recognized art centre, and in a mining community (Thompson) without a gallery or cohesive arts community, creates both obstacles and extends benefits. I am neither engaged nor entangled in any specific arts trend or tangent but can embrace the freedom to grow a little wild. My husband and I spend most weekends and holidays at a small log cabin without running water at Paint Lake. The foxes and ravens call by, and the beavers have set up homes on both of my neighbours’ lots. I am always amazed that Canada, as a country, and certainly most of this continent, was mapped and developed because of a beaver and the status of a beaver top hat. A country was born of fur and skin. That I live in the original trading area of the Hudson Bay Company, and have married a “Hudson” has only added the layers that define this artistic identity.

In 2004-07, I embarked upon a journey, like Alice in Wonderland, into my A(lass) in Rupertsland series that took the English-born Alice into the history and wilderness of the fur trade. The beaded top hats and The (Sul)fur Queen, an elaborately beaded and beaver skull adorned gown made of Hudson Bay blankets, complete with its own crown, started the story of those who had lived by the motto pro pelle cutem (we risk our lives for skins).Taking Alice in her flowers could only expand on my life as a child of the sixties, hippies and flower power married to the many beaded flowers of the north, patterns handed down in families for generations. A medieval phrase, “in her flowers”, was a metaphor for a young woman and her start of menses. But being part of the never lost, I am always invited somewhere that changes the art and the journey.

Caribou Women in her Flowers Ceremonial Robe, 2008-2010, lifesize (Approx 2x5 feet)

In 2007, I received a Manitoba Arts Council grant. After being gifted a set of many-tined caribou antlers, the reference to the caribou antlers as blooming, their mythos so closely tied to fertility and spring, added to the original concept of female rites. Reindeer are found on the walls of the Lascaux caves in France. The “sanctuary des trois frères”, images within the cave, had to have a feminine translation.  Ancient stories of shape shifting goddesses, caribou reindeer women, celebrated winter solstice sisters; protectresses of the earth who carried back the sun in their antlers, melted the ice and icicles and welcome the world to be reborn in their flowers.

Beadwork detail of Caribou Women in her Flowers from rear of Ceremonial Robe, 2007-2010, approx, 8 inches in dia.

I created a dress, a hat and sun staff adorned in antlers. I invited numerous friends during the winter solstice through to the spring, to be photographed adorned in golden antlers.  The purpose was to showcase strong personalities, these women’s sacred wisdom born out of personal migrations but with an entourage of sisters. Some of the faces, with antlers and beads, evolved into the madre primavera top hat, the sun staff and the ceremonial in her flowers robe (2007-2010).

Caribou Women Sun Staff, beadwork detail, 2009, approx. 9” dia.

Becoming part of the “never lost” requires a guide. Like a girl in a northern fairy tale, I married a bear. My husband has from childhood in the north, had permission to do as he pleases. On a trip south, he drove inland from the highway, stopped and stepped into the bushes, beckoning the rest of us to follow the trail. Little did we know that the trail exists in his mind and soon all that was recognizable was rustling in the bushes and the symphonies of mosquito orchestras. He would double back and trample forth as we hurdled boreal obstacles, trying to align our experiences with his overlaid colour commentary “Isn’t this beautiful?” ”Not far now,” and “I don’t know why more people don’t come here!”

Caribou Women Madre Primevera, 2009, beadwork detail approx. 12” x 17”

Art often takes us off the beaten track and journeys into the light, often starting in the dark. Homer’s sirens and harpies say, ”We know all that happens on this much suffering earth.” And I have known many dark places. After immigrating to Canada, we lived in downtown Vancouver, blocks away from Pickton’s infamous killing ground. My 1999 Raven Ballet: The Unkindness of Nights Below Zero and 2003 Lost Pearls:  Daughters of St. Anthony’s Abattoir were painted for the murdered and missing women.

During the A(lass) in Rupertland series, I dreamed of blue faces and beaver women, barely seen through sheer fabric hanging in the boreal forest. Veils separate us from the world of the dead and the voices from beyond. The shaking tent allowed for the invocation of animal guides to bring messages and guidance from the spirit world. However, northern humour also translates the “shaking tent” as places in the bush where couples might have sex. Researching certain myths, blue often was a colour for otherworldly creatures, those from the underworld, the dead. If my beaver women were dead spirits, it was possible they had risked their lives with their skins. And with the word beaver being slang for a woman’s vagina, the risk may have been sexual. My beaver women had shape shifted through history from the fur trade to the sex trade and were risking their lives with their skin, either willingly or simply by the nature of their gender. Could art be an investigation of the traps we lay out in our cultures that condemn feral women, and of the media portrayals that strip them of their muchness and stereotype them as the Madonna and Magdalene.

Mirrors of the Mystery Lake Dam'oiselles, Photomontage, 2005, 36” x 48”

With another grant from the Manitoba Arts Council, I am creating a series of dam’oiselles to honour the shaking tent women and those of us who have heeded calls to live wild lives, who may risk our lives with skin and tell our stories with bones. In their sanctuary, the shaking tent sisters, camouflaged ethereal beings, emancipated, engaged, embraced, entangled, exiled but never entrapped, can respectfully be laid bare, shedding their layers, continuously shaking off the world but offering tantalizing signals.  “I am here” for our curiouser and curiouser world.

In November 2010, jurors for the RBC Glass Artist Award recognized my work as a finalist and also supported The Blue Beaver’s Burden and The Disappearance of the Shaking Tent Sisters. It was a welcome affirmation that beadwork could have a place in the contemporary glass art scene and I hope the complexity, labour and artistic excellence of beadwork can expand the boundaries of art. I continue to dream, and follow my own invisible path, hoping my work can contribute to the cultural legacy being created by glass artists.

Blue Beaver's Burden, Work in Progress, 2010, 10” x 20”