The Anishinaabe artist’s work reflects Indigenous realities with haunting resonance.
The Tyee: The 20th annual Audain Prize ceremony, which took place at the Hotel Vancouver this fall, was a suitably grand affair. There was a Scottish bagpiper, various government ministers and a catered lunch for the well-heeled and powerful. It felt a world away from the grinding, messy, uncertain work of making art.
Established in 2004, the Audain Prize for the Visual Arts is given annually to a senior Canadian artist. Past recipients have included Liz Magor, Gordon Smith, Gathie Falk, Paul Wong and Dana Claxton.
The 2024 winner of the $100,000 prize was Rebecca Belmore.
A member of the Lac Seul First Nation from Anishinaabe territories in northwestern Ontario, Belmore’s practice has taken her around the globe. Along the way, she has collected awards and honours including honorary doctorates from the Ontario College of Art and Design University and Emily Carr University of Art + Design. In addition to the Audain Prize, Belmore has been recognized with the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation’s VIVA Award, the Hnatyshyn Foundation Visual Arts Award, the 2013 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts and the Gershon Iskowitz Prize.
Maybe it’s this chasm between the glittering stuff of awards and the practice of making art that feels so surreal, even if you’re on the sidelines watching it all happen. Being in the centre with all its attendant pageantry must feel particularly strange, but Belmore is equanimous about her most recent national award.
On the phone from her studio in Vancouver — she splits her time between Toronto and B.C. — Belmore is straightforward. “There’s no EI, or social assistance, when you’re an artist,” she states matter-of-factly. “There’s no guarantee. That’s the risk.”
Money is useful, in that it affords time and opportunity to make more work. And Belmore has always been an artist of labour, whether it’s the effort of bringing something new into being or the blunt, brute stuff of survival. Over the course of her career, she has used the most basic of materials: a bucket, a hammer, dirt, nails, things that people understand and can relate to.
In one of her earliest works, Rising to the Occasion, created to coincide with an official royal visit to Thunder Bay in 1987, Belmore constructed a Victorian dress out of fabric, teacup saucers, chicken wire and sticks. Part of a performance/parade called Twelve Angry Crinolines, the event was staged alongside the ceremonies to welcome the then-Duke and Duchess of York. The dress combined monarchist trinkets (silver spoons, souvenir mugs) with a beaver dam bustle.
Made for $50, the original dress ended up getting tossed out, but when curators asked if the work could be included in an exhibition, Belmore admitted that she’d thrown it away and had to recreate it again, with slightly better materials. The reconstruction took on new life as a sculpture, but the intent to make explicit the complex assemblage that is Indigenous and colonial history remained.
“I’m an artist of ideas,” she explains.
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Nothing makes this more evident than her massive 2018 retrospective Facing the Monumental, a collection of three decades of work, performances, sculptures, photographs and installations. I saw the show when it was at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. It blew me away, not just the scale and breadth of the idea explored, but the staggering amounts of beauty that emerge from some of the darkest chapters in Canadian history.
She sees her role as one of bearing witness, as is made plain in her artist’s statement about her retrospective: “For decades I have been working as the artist amongst my people, calling to the past, witnessing the present, standing forward, facing the monumental.”
Be it the intimate acts of violation perpetuated against Indigenous bodies or greater historical wrongs, the overarching ideas and issues that have marked Belmore’s work are often rendered in ordinary, even commonplace materials. This approach offers an ease of access that belies the challenging ideas contained within.
In artist (No. 2), a large-scale photograph features Belmore, dressed in brightly coloured safety gear, facing a large expanse of orange tarpaulins that stretch over a construction site in Winnipeg. The orange covering is seemingly endless, rearing up and outwards to the sky. The visual alone is compelling enough, but there is a deeper meaning embedded in the image. The fluorescent X that marks the back of Belmore’s jacket offers a not-so-oblique connection to Canada’s colonial past, where Indigenous people were forced to sign land treaties with an X.
Many of Belmore’s works are so beautifully fashioned that you don’t notice initially what they embody until you’re knee-deep in the middle of the experience. Nothing makes this more explicit than Fringe.
The photographic installation was inspired by a story of an Indigenous woman who had gone into hospital for back surgery. To pass the time, she had brought her beading work with her. After waking up from the procedure, she noticed that the surgeon had sewn some of her beads into the sutures along her spine without her permission.
The resulting image, a lone woman lying prone, a long scar following the curve of her back, contains both horror and a strange form of beauty. Belmore conceived of the image as a form of healing and ultimately resilience.
A similar kind of endurance has marked Belmore’s work from the beginning.
Unless you have a day job teaching or some other means of making a living, to be a working artist in Canada can be a licence for poverty. Belmore has always been on the side of the disenfranchised, whether it’s refugees or the unhoused. “I went for a drive yesterday to Abbotsford, and there’s quite a large tent city,” she tells me. She goes on to speculate how people access services and survive.
This yawning division between the wealthy and the poor is at the centre of many of her works, including Biinjiya’iing Onji (From Inside).
Created for the 2017 documenta exhibition in Athens, Greece, the installation consisted of a marble tent installed atop a hillside in direct line of sight of the Acropolis. The actual structure was large enough to accommodate a few people sitting inside.
In the description of the work, Belmore stated, “The shape of the tent is, for me, reminiscent of the wigwam dwellings that are part of my history as an Indigenous person.” The tent has arguably moved from an object of recreation (camping trips, hiking) to one of basic survival for people around the world.
Working in different media — performance, sculpture, photography — has afforded Belmore a scope and scale to encompass intractable issues, from murdered and missing Indigenous women to starlight tours. It is often the simplest materials and the most direct gestures that sink the deepest.
Created as part of the 2016 Nuit Blanche at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Clay on Stone took place over the course of 12 hours, as Belmore worked overnight covering the AGO courtyard in a wash of red clay inscribed with the words “land,” “breath” and “water,” before those too were wiped away into a wider expanse of abstraction.
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As Belmore’s work has evolved and developed, she says that involving active collaborators is something she is open to. Sometimes her collaborators are friends and family; her sister often photographs her performances. Other times, they are ordinary people. In 2014, Belmore created trace for the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. She worked with high school students and the general public to produce clay beads that bear the imprint of the human hands that made them.
Belmore assembled the individual beads into the shape of a large blanket. The intent was to make visible the largely obscured history of the land upon which the museum was situated. Both the immediate and the accessible combined with remarkable scale and the immensity of time (some 6,000 years of human activity). The work was an indelible reminder of the long-standing relationship that Indigenous people share with the land itself.
Belmore explained the concept in an interview with Border Crossingsmagazine: “Trace exists between the individual and the community. What it pulls together is the idea that we are a people — we all belong to a shared community.”
The past and present tangle inextricably together in Belmore’s performances, installations and images. The ultimate effect is resonant, haunting experience: art in its truest form.
Dorothy Woodend, The Tyee
Dorothy Woodend is the culture editor for The Tyee.
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