My recent works celebrate three women: my great grandmother, Eléanore, an itinerant midwife who delivered hundreds of babies in Métis households in the Red River district; my grandmother, Clémence, who was born on a hunt, raised on a trading post, worked as a Cree – French – English translator and fiercely denied her Indigenous ancestry to protect her 15 children; and my naturalist mother, Anita. Mom’s storytelling and quest for historical documents defied family protocol and set the stage for my generation to reclaim our Métis heritage.

As a process-based artist, I harvest plant material to make iterative works that reflect the generational aspect of our family story. Working intuitively, I stage and photograph berries, leaves, blossoms and thorns, then scale the resulting digital images and use them to create works on paper, textile or in 360° animation. Some of the printed images are then embellished using women’s traditional handwork (embroidering, beading, hand-tinting) and used to create large-scale works. Others are hand or laser-cut and presented as icons to represent our family story or the flora and fauna of the Red River district - homeland of the Métis.

I invented the ‘Berries to Beads’ digital beading technique that combines berries with high-resolution digital tools to create scalable ‘beaded’ works. This photo-based technique mirrors spectacular traditional beading: it is both a meticulous and technically demanding practice and art form that showcases Métis history and honours plants as the basis of life on earth. I used my digital-beading technique to create ‘Barn Owl and Moon’ - a three-part collage of laser-cut images printed on Canson Rag paper. The work marks my Mother’s peaceful passing at age 92. Mom was a 45-year practitioner of yoga with a daily practice who had a life-long fascination with owls. This one's for you Mom!