Daphne Boyer

Seeds of Connection - Warren Cariou, August 2022

In Daphne Boyer’s art, everything is more than what it seems. Digital imaging is embedded in the analog richness of plant materials; icons reverberate with stories; discrete elements of each work form new meanings within a network of relations. Inspired by the artist’s life-long devotion to plants, these works reflect a gardener’s eye for design and a herbalist’s knowledge of the ways in which plants can be our allies. The works also draw from centuries-old traditions of Métis material culture, especially the distinctive flower-beadwork patterns that have carried Métis plant knowledge for generations. The artist routes these traditions through the transforming conduit of digital imaging to create new ways of understanding our relationships to the land and to one another–human and beyond.

These works have even more meanings for me personally, because Daphne is my first cousin, the daughter of my brilliant and beloved Aunt Anita, who was one of my favourite storytellers in our family of splendid raconteurs. My understanding of Daphne’s art is inevitably influenced by the family stories, relationships and memories we’ve shared throughout our lives, and I am grateful for this opportunity to reflect on the ways this work resonates with my own experience and preoccupations. While our shared family connection may give me an idiosyncratic point of view on these works, I think this is also very appropriate because they are all, in one way or another, about kinship connections. 

This focus on kinship is clear in “All My Relations,” which is dedicated to the artist’s late mother Anita. Daphne’s arrangement of simple iconic images throughout this mural perfectly represents the circularity of Aunt Anita’s storytelling style, as well as her love of the plants and animals of the prairies. The imagery of vehicles--including canoes, Red River carts, and 1970s-style cars–represents the theme of movement in our family’s history, dating back to the fur trade, as relatives traveled in search of work and then traveled again to reconnect with kin. As the title suggests, the artist’s relations in this mural are also the plants and animals themselves, reflecting the ethic of reciprocity that is a key element of Métis teachings. While there are no human figures depicted in Daphne Boyer’s work, the human presence is always visible in that sense of our kinship with the other beings of the natural world.

The use of natural materials is most noticeable in “Poison Ivy and Thorns” and “Hung Out to Dry,” both of which are constructed out of digital photographs of leaves. The first of these shows poison ivy leaves stitched together with hawthorns and cut into the shape of a tipi cover, something like the buffalo hide tipi coverings of an earlier era. The digital medium enables an element of fantasy here, since these actual leaves would not be large or strong enough to cover a tipi, but the result poses a suggestive question: how could this famously toxic plant be crafted into a shelter, a home? Perhaps we can learn something from poison ivy, which protects itself from harm by exuding its irritants onto anyone who mistreats it. This image, then, is about survival, about creating a home that is safe in a world that threatens all kinds of harm. 

“Hung Out to Dry” also references harm, though it may at first appear to be a quiet domestic image, with its beautiful strips of circular leaf cut-outs attached to a line by clothespins. But when we realize that these splashes of colour are created from photos of maple leaves–the quintessential symbol of Canadian nationhood–then the title of the work takes on a different meaning. In the late 19th century, the Métis nation was indeed hung out to dry by the fledgling state of Canada, which sought to establish itself in the west through the violent suppression of Métis rights. This reached a crescendo in Canada’s attack on Batoche and the subsequent execution of Louis Riel–by hanging. In that light, these bright discs of maple leaf hanging down from the line resemble nothing so much as dried blood, wounds only partially healed since 1885. 

“Barn Owl and Moon” and “Moss Bag” are two examples of Daphne’s Berries to Beads process, in which thousands of digital images of berries are arranged in patterns like traditional Métis beadwork. I love how this process literalizes the name of the “seed beads” that have played such an important role in Métis material culture. In both works, one major difference from traditional beadwork is scale. Printing these images in a large format allows the viewer to recognize the “seeds” within the beads, and to contemplate the ways that traditional beadwork is connected to practises of plant harvesting, preservation and consumption.

In “The Birthing Tent,” the symbolism of beadwork is evoked in new ways, with the traditional bead patterns on the hanging banners being linked to the ceiling panel that depicts the molecular structure of the hormone oxytocin, known popularly as “the love hormone” for its function in promoting family bonding, especially between mother and child.  Here, Métis traditions are held alongside contemporary scientific understandings, revealing the interconnectedness of knowledge and the continual relevance of the teachings embedded in traditional practices. When I consider these old beadwork patterns in relation to the remarkable ceiling of “The Birthing Tent” I see them differently:  the beads become metaphors for the building blocks of nature, and also the emotional building blocks of family. This work is particularly special to me because it is dedicated to my (and Daphne’s) great-grandmother, Éléonore Beaulieu, née Hamelin, who was a midwife on the plains, traveling to different communities and guiding a new generation of Métis into the world.  This celebration of Éléonore’s legacy is also a broader honoring of Métis women’s tireless work to inculcate the love of family and community into each generation.  I especially love the fact that this birthing tent is a dwelling made of art, a place where culture continues to be born through a woman’s creative energy.

The artist’s other series of large and brightly coloured banners is reminiscent of those in “The Birthing Tent,” but these ones bring a different kind of natural pattern to the foreground, this time representing the sacred medicine plants, cedar and sweetgrass.  Here, the shapes and textures of the plant fibers are created from digital images of porcupine quills of the kind used in the traditional quillwork that predates the use of beads in Métis decorative traditions.  The labour-intensive art of quillwork is less common today than beadwork, but it is still practised by a few artists, and there is a revival of interest in the tradition.  In Daphne’s new version of quillwork, the quills become nearly indistinguishable from the plant patterns they mimic.  The sweetgrass banners take the classic form of sweetgrass braids, which themselves echo braids of human hair, making another link between our bodies, the medicine plants, and the bodies of our kin animals.  The large scale of these banners provides viewers an opportunity to view the structures of the porcupine quills—their textures, their individuality, even their unique imperfections—while at the same time making them almost monumental and thus highlighting their vitality and power.

The final pieces in the exhibition represent two plants that often grow together on the west coast of Turtle Island:  spiral moss and garry oak trees.  The moss is relatively recognizable in the luxurious texture printed on the silk medium, but the elliptical shapes, which belong to garry oak leaves, are more mysterious.  Inspired by the electron micrographs of artist Robert Dash, these shapes are highly magnified images of garry oak stomata—the orifices through which trees “breathe” by exchanging gases with the surrounding atmosphere.  These stomata take the evocative shape of human lips or vulvas, leading us to wonder:  what stories, what progeny might issue forth from them? Indeed, all of the works in this exhibition ask us to listen to the plants, for what they can tell us about the world of life beyond, and within, ourselves.  What they are communicating, Daphne Boyer’s art suggests, is the profound interconnectedness of all life.  This teaching is a foundational aspect of Indigenous knowledge, but it is also deeply supported by scientific observation.  We rely upon plants to regulate the very air we breathe, producing oxygen and absorbing CO2 through their stomata.  This of course is directly connected to the functioning of the global climate system that is now in such a disrupted state.  And so we see, in the beautiful patterns of these minuscule plant-parts, a truth about our real place in the order of the world.  These mouths are mothers to us all.  We do not exist separately from them; we exist with and because of them.  Daphne Boyer’s work reflects brilliantly on the manifold repercussions of this knowledge, showing us how plants are literally our relations, our teachers, and our future.

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