1 of 8
Photo: Kenji Nagai / Spirit Wrestler Gallery.
"Salish Salmon Weave"
Susan Point, "Salish Salmon Weave," 2013, glass (sand-carved slumped and kiln-cast), yellow cedar and paint, 60” x 40” x 5.5” (vertical or horizontal install).
2 of 8
Photo: Kenji Nagai / Spirit Wrestler Gallery.
"Cedar Root with Salmon"
Susan Point, "Cedar Root with Salmon," 2013, glass, red cedar and cedar bark (rope), 25” x 24” x 10”.
3 of 8
Photo: Kenji Nagai / Spirit Wrestler Gallery.
"Renewal"
Susan Point, "Renewal," 2013, glass (blown), red cedar and paint, 14” x 23” x 14”.
4 of 8
Photo: Kenji Nagai / Spirit Wrestler Gallery.
"Salish Path"
Susan Point, "Salish Path," 2010, serigraph, 38.3” x 27”.
5 of 8
Photo: Kenji Nagai / Spirit Wrestler Gallery.
"Sacred Weave"
Susan Point, "Sacred Weave," 2003, woodblock print, 27.5” x 27”.
6 of 8
Susan Point (photo by Mark Mushet)
7 of 8
Susan Point, with her daughter, Kelly Cannell, and son, Thomas Cannell (photo by Mark Mushet)
8 of 8
"Works on Paper"
Book: "Works on Paper" by Dale Croes, Susan Point and Gary Wyatt
ON POINT: Art a family affair for renowned Coast Salish artist Susan Point
By Janet Nicol
When Coast Salish artist Susan Point was getting her start back in the 1980s, galleries were not interested in her work with glass. “They said it wasn’t a native medium,” she recalls. “I didn’t care.” That commitment to her own vision has served Point well. One of the West Coast’s most acclaimed indigenous artists, she’s known as a groundbreaker within her community and beyond, working not only with glass, but also a variety of other media – everything from carving to printmaking. She has produced many major public art projects and her numerous accolades include appointment as an officer of the Order of Canada and honorary doctorates from four British Columbia universities.
With an exhibition of her colourful and richly imagined prints this spring at Vancouver’s Spirit Wrestler Gallery – which is launching a second book about her work, Susan Point: Works on Paper – she is a remarkably busy artist. Indeed, just a few months ago, Point had a glass show, From Pilchuck to Present, at Spirit Wrestler, which included pieces she had started at a 2002 residency at the Pilchuck Glass School in Washington. Point brought the work back home to the Musqueam reserve, near the mouth of the Fraser River in Vancouver, but couldn’t find time to finish it. “I got back into my day-to-day work,” she says. “And the vessels were tucked away.”
Point has been in steady demand for major public commissions, including massive relief sculptures in 15 concrete buttresses at Richmond’s Olympic Oval and a bronze sculpture at Whistler’s Olympic Plaza. It was only last year that she was she finally able to unwrap the work from Pilchuck. “I thought it was about time,” she says. “I wanted to finish them off and I decided to do a glass show. I began working on the pieces, one by one.” They are inspired by Salish implements, including rattles and spindle whorls, as well as basketry and stone-hammer motifs. “They each have their own images, their own titles and their own stories,” Point says. “There are images of the thunderbird, eagle, the salmon and sea otters.” One stunning piece, Salish Salmon Weave, features fish that seem to swim through woven strips of glass. “Elders spoke of the waters appearing black because of the countless number of salmon beneath the swells,” she writes in her artist’s statement. “It is now an age for protecting and preserving the wild salmon of the Pacific Northwest coast.”
Point has worked with leading curators, architects, designers and engineers, but her most meaningful collaborations may be with family – her husband, Jeff Cannell, and their daughter, Kelly Cannell, and son, Thomas Cannell, as well as Brent Sparrow and Rhea Guerin (née Sparrow), Point’s son and daughter from her first marriage. All four are artists and live on the Musqueam reserve, where they are raising their own families. Jeff, who grew up in Toronto, has a background as a commercial artist.
The family operates as a team, says Kelly, who has worked with her mother on projects for the Seattle Children’s Hospital and the Vancouver Convention Centre. They also won a 2004 public art competition for Vancouver storm-sewer covers with a design that depicts the life cycle of the frog. “We make it happen together,” says Kelly.
Tom, who has two young children, agrees the family is a support system. “We feed off each other for ideas,” he says. Along with Kelly, he has been working on a commission for a private development. While staying true to traditional elements, they’ve also let their imaginations soar, envisioning two large light boxes featuring images of land and sky, along with deer and eagles. “It’s something no one has done before,” says Tom. Another of his recent projects is Vitality, a massive sculpture composed of four basalt slabs outside the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts in nearby Burnaby. The work, which shows a family arriving at the park in a canoe, is intended to evoke a sense of community.
While Tom and Kelly are full-time artists, Sparrow, a father of four, has a day job as a welder. Still, he spent five years working alongside Point. “I like to carve with wood,” he says. He helped Point in Stanley Park as she created three carved gateways – two vertical posts supporting a horizontal beam that visitors might have walked under when entering a traditional longhouse. Sparrow has since completed a 40-foot house post outside the new law building at the University of British Columbia. Guerin, meanwhile, is busy with her five children, but still finds time for art. For instance, during the Olympics, she worked with other family members on various cedar sculptures outside the Vancouver Art Gallery.
Point, born to Edna Grant and Anthony Point in 1952, remembers watching her mother weave. “She made designs for sweaters using graph-paper designs. My dad was a logger and my older brother carved.” He taught Point to carve, giving her entry to a male realm. “I have never been discouraged from carving,” she says. “I enjoyed it. I went for it. I’m slowing down now though.”
Point was a legal secretary when she took her first step into the art world in 1980 by taking a jewelry-making course. At the time, West Coast art was dominated by Haida carvers, she says. She was curious about the art of the Coast Salish, whose traditional territory includes the Lower Mainland and the southern end of Vancouver Island. Much traditional knowledge was lost after European contact, but Point did extensive research with help from elders and art experts. “No one was doing it in the early 1980s, except a few people like Stan Greene, who lived in the Chilliwack area,” she says. Largely self-taught, Point cultivated her distinct style over three decades by fusing modern and traditional elements, drawing inspiration from age-old stories but using new materials and techniques.
Point now wants to spend more of her time with personal projects. “I’d like to take fewer commissions and get back to my own work,” she says. “I’d like to settle down and do some drawing and see what I create.” She also looks forward to mentoring a new generation. “Having my grandchildren with me is very good,” she says. “I guide them in the traditional ways. Children have a free mind. In five minutes, they have something. They understand and they envision – if you give them freedom.”
