Christi Belcourt

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Christi Belcourt, “Water Song,” 2010-2011

acrylic on canvas, 79” x 153” (purchased 2011, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; photo courtesy NGC)

If Mother Earth could paint, she would undoubtedly produce canvases like Water Song or This Painting is a Mirror, floral beauties by Christi Belcourt on view at the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina later this month as part of a cross-country tour.

Belcourt’s acrylic paintings celebrate myriad forms of life. Intertwined colourful plants, birds and fish are painstakingly created with tiny dots of paint that resemble traditional Métis beadwork. The paintings are gentle, joyous and mesmerizing. The Italian fashion house Valentino, with Belcourt’s permission, has incorporated some designs into one of their clothing lines. 

Belcourt’s retrospective, Uprising: The Power of Mother Earth, is a joint project of the Thunder Bay Art Gallery and the Carleton University Art Gallery in Ottawa. It opens Nov. 16 and contains 36 paintings and several protest banners that Belcourt and collaborator Isaac Murdoch created at various environmentally themed community events. 

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Christi Belcourt, “This Painting is a Mirror,” 2012

acrylic on canvas, 81” x 101” (collection of Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada; photo by Lawrence Cook)

Uprising is an appropriate word to use with Belcourt, who lives in Espanola in Northern Ontario but has roots in the Métis community of Manitou Sakhigan (Lac Ste. Anne) west of Edmonton.

She has long called for a revolution to protect the planet from pollution, resource exploitation and climate change, so the plants and wildlife pictured in her paintings do not wither and die. She also wants a revolution so Indigenous peoples can regain the land and the future she feels was taken from them by successive Canadian governments. 

Belcourt speaks with a soft, soothing voice, but she pulls no punches when she talks about the destruction of the planet and its Indigenous peoples. “Canada represents the largest land heist in the history of the world,” she told an academic conference at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ont., three years ago.

In a recent interview, Belcourt said saving the planet “is going to require an uprising of common folk” to change an economic system that benefits only a minority of people. The rights of the Earth need to be respected, she says. “So, when I talk of rights, I think of rights of the water, the rights of the animals, the rights of the trees to exist. All of these things have as much right to be here as we do.”

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Christi Belcourt, “Resilience of the Flower Beadwork People,” 1999

acrylic on canvas,  48” x 36”(collection of Amanda Greener and Shane Belcourt; photo by Justin Wonnacott)

Despite environmental problems and challenges around Indigenous rights, Belcourt says she retains a sense of optimism. No empire in history has lasted forever, she says. “We have the power to remake the kind of world, the kind of future, we want.”

She points to the Onaman Collective that she operates with Murdoch. It aims to teach Aboriginal languages and customs to young people. She speaks proudly of watching youths learning to tan moose hides.

Belcourt is perhaps best known to national audiences for the popular, seven-year-long traveling exhibition, Walking With Our Sisters. A community-based project, it contained about 2,000 moccasin vamps (tops) that commemorated missing and murdered Indigenous women and their families. The touring exhibition wrapped up this year.

Belcourt has been an artist for many years. Her paintings are in important collections, including the National Gallery of Canada, which owns Water Song, a work so big you feel as if you are staring at a movie screen. You almost expect the leaves to flutter as hummingbirds flit from one flower to the next.

“Her floral works are just beautiful,” says the show’s curator Nadia Kurd, who works at the University of Alberta Art Collection. “Her work has a broad aesthetic appeal and when they (viewers) get up close to see how it’s made, they marvel at the expansiveness of these single dots on a canvas.” ■

Uprising: The Power of Mother Earth is at the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina from Nov. 16, 2019 to March 22, 2020.

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