Michelle Sound

Indigenous artist stitches together colonial wounds.

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Cree and Métis artist Michelle Sound’s exhibition, Holding It Together, on view until April 15 at Ceremonial/Art in Vancouver, is a compelling and beautiful engagement with history. 

Sound, a member of Wapsewsipi Swan River First Nation on Treaty 8 territory northwest of Edmonton, rips images and then repairs them using traditional methods and materials, succinctly connecting viewers to issues of cultural restoration while celebrating lives disrupted by colonialism.

Her large-scale reproductions of black and white photographs from her personal archive are punctuated by bursts and slashes of textured colour made with seed beads, quillwork, threading and caribou-hair tufting. In some cases, the colours are like sprouting seeds that seem to tint the entire image.

One standout is Kokum and Mosum, which shows a commercial street photographer’s snapshot of Sound’s grandparents in Edmonton in the 1960s. There are many similar images of people strolling in urban cores in other family albums, so this image creates a sense of connection and helps ensure Indigenous lives are a visible part of that era’s everyday reality.

In two landscape works, Strawberry Creek and Kinuso, the embroidery threading, seed-beading and caribou hair-tufted repairs dance across the surface as though swirling in the wind. The images are from her uncle’s place in northern Alberta. Sound, who lives in Vancouver, says she feels attached to muskeg and boggy land, and these pieces are about longing for land from which many Indigenous people were forcibly removed. Variants of these Sipikiskisiw (Remembers Far Back) works are part of a public art project now on display at the Telus transit shelter in downtown Edmonton. 

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Michelle Sound, “Kinuso,” 2022

Michelle Sound, “Kinuso,” 2022

monochrome print on paper, embroidery thread, seed beads and caribou tufting, 51.5" x 39" (courtesy the artist and Ceremonial/Art)

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Michelle Sound, “Strawberry Creek,” 2022

Michelle Sound, “Strawberry Creek,” 2022

monochrome print on paper, embroidery thread, seed beads and metallic pony beads, 51.5" x 39" (courtesy the artist and Ceremonial/Art)

The shapes created by Sound’s handiwork take specific forms. Tufts of brightly dyed caribou hair burst out like miniature fireworks, while bead and quillwork seem more like suspension bridges. It reminds me of Kintsugi or “golden joinery” – the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery so signs of repair are left visible to become part of each object’s history. But Sound’s work has little to do with the object – the repairs are figurative undertakings to reclaim land, language, spirit and relations. And, unlike a broken vase, there is always more to do.

In the exhibition essay, Cree writer Billy-Ray Belcourt suggests that Sound is creating emotional landscapes. “We have to think paradoxically,” he writes. “Which is to say that we recognize that sometimes our desires are impossible or laden with difficulty but we desire all the same. It also means that we have to believe that it is possible to confront history’s atrocities and not be ruined in doing so.”

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Michelle Sound, “Dictionary,” 2022

Michelle Sound, “Dictionary,” 2022

monochrome print on paper, embroidery thread, seed beads and dyed fox fur, 51.5" x 39" (courtesy the artist and Ceremonial/Art)

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Michelle Sound, “Cree,” 2022

Michelle Sound, “Cree,” 2022

monochrome print on paper, embroidery thread, seed beads and metallic thread, 51.5" x 39" (courtesy the artist and Ceremonial/Art)

Two text-based works, Cree and Dictionary take their starting point from pages reproduced from Cree language workbooks from the 1970s that Sound encountered as a youth. They belonged to her mother and may have come originally from a friendship centre. She chose to rip out Cree words she finds difficult to pronounce. By mending the torn pages, she draws attention to the precarity of Indigenous languages, which have been subject to attempted erasure by colonialism.

We tell ourselves to hold it together when facing difficult or emotionally-charged situations, often related to injustice or violence. Here, the titular expression does double duty as a call for restoration and celebration. This exhibition is bright and dark in just the right measure, an attempt to mend the past and look toward a better future. ■

Michelle Sound: Holding It Together at Ceremonial/Art in Vancouver from Feb. 24 to April 15, 2023. Curated by Jake Kimble.

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Ceremonial / Art

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