Advanced Listening Practice

James: Claire, thanks for being here. For listeners who aren't familiar with your work, can you give us a starting point?

Claire: Sure. I work primarily with natural materials, cedar bark, wool, plant dyes, things that come from the land and have been used by Indigenous artists in this region for generations. But I also incorporate contemporary elements, photography, text, sometimes digital prints. So the work sits in a space between traditional practice and something more modern, which is where I'm most comfortable, I think. I like the tension between those two things. When you put a woven cedar panel next to a photograph, neither one looks quite the same as it would on its own.

James: When you say traditional practice, how did you come to learn those techniques? Was that something you grew up with?

Claire: Some of it, yes. My grandmother was a weaver, and I spent time with her as a child, watching, mostly. She wasn't the type to sit you down and give you a lesson. You just observed, and eventually she'd hand you something and say, try it. But a lot of what I know now came later, through community workshops and from other artists who were generous with their knowledge. There's a misconception sometimes that these skills are passed down in an unbroken line from generation to generation, and for some families that is true. But for many of us, there were gaps. Residential schools broke a lot of those connections. Children were taken from communities, languages were suppressed, and the everyday transmission of knowledge, the kind that happens informally between a grandmother and a grandchild, was interrupted for entire generations.

So part of my work has been about recovering things that were disrupted. Which is a different process than inheriting something whole. It requires a kind of humility, because you're always aware of what you don't know and may never know.

James: That idea of recovery comes through strongly in your recent series, the one currently on exhibition. The pieces feel like they're in conversation with absence, if that makes sense.

Claire: It does, and I'm glad you put it that way. That's a more honest framing than completeness. Some of the pieces in that series use fragments deliberately, a partial pattern, a weave that stops midway, because that reflects the reality. The knowledge isn't complete. There are things my grandmother knew that I will never learn because there was nobody left to teach them. The person who would have carried that knowledge forward was in a residential school at the age when she should have been learning it. I could pretend otherwise. I could create work that looks whole and finished and traditionally perfect. But that wouldn't be truthful.

James: It would also be easier for a gallery audience to receive, wouldn't it? Something complete and beautiful is simpler to engage with than something that's about what's missing.

Claire: Yes. And that's a tension I think about often. There's a market for work that's visually resolved, that tells a clear story, that a collector can hang on a wall and feel good about. I understand that, and I don't look down on artists who work that way. But I'm more interested in the discomfort. If a piece makes someone pause and wonder what they're looking at, or feel that something is absent without quite being able to name it, then I think it's doing something that matters.

James: How do galleries respond to that approach? There's often an expectation, I think, that Indigenous art should look or function in a certain way.

Claire: There is. And I've had those conversations more times than I can count. Early in my career, there was a lot of pressure to produce work that fit into what I'd call the ethnographic framework. Art that explains itself, that comes with a cultural backstory, that serves an educational purpose for a non-Indigenous audience. You're not just making art, you're representing your culture, which is a weight that non-Indigenous artists don't carry. Nobody asks a painter from Toronto to explain what it means to be a white Canadian every time they exhibit. They're just allowed to make work.

And some Indigenous artists are comfortable with that representative role, and that's their choice to make. But I found it limiting. I wanted to make work that didn't have to justify itself through its cultural context, that could exist as art and be judged on its own terms. That's been a longer fight than I expected.

James: Has it gotten easier over time?

Claire: Somewhat. The institutional landscape has shifted. There are more Indigenous curators in positions of influence, more galleries that understand the diversity within Indigenous art rather than treating it as one thing. But the underlying assumption is still there in many spaces, the idea that our work is inherently "about" something, that it carries a message, that it's political by default. And sometimes it is political. But sometimes I'm just making something because the material interests me, and that should be allowed too.

James: I want to ask about reconciliation, because it's a word that gets used in the art world quite a lot now. What does it mean to you in the context of your practice?

Claire: That's a big question, and I want to be careful with it because I can only speak for myself. I think reconciliation as a concept has been overused to the point where it's lost some of its precision. It gets attached to everything, every exhibition, every grant application, every institutional statement. And sometimes it feels like a way for organizations to signal that they're doing something meaningful without actually changing anything structural. You can call a show a reconciliation exhibition, but if the institution that hosts it still has no Indigenous people on its board, what exactly has been reconciled?

For me, personally, reconciliation isn't something that happens in a gallery. It happens in relationships, in policy, in the return of land and the revitalization of language. My art might contribute to a conversation around those things, but I'd be uncomfortable claiming that it does the work of reconciliation itself. That would be giving art more weight than it deserves and giving institutions an excuse to hang a show and feel they've done their part.

James: That's a distinction I don't think gets made often enough.

Claire: No. And I understand why. It's easier to fund an exhibition than to address a land claim. The art world is comfortable with symbolic gestures because that's what it deals in, symbols. But the communities I come from need more than symbols. They need clean water, they need housing, they need their children's language to survive another generation. A beautiful show in a gallery downtown doesn't move the needle on any of that.

James: Where is your work going next? What are you interested in exploring?

Claire: Language. I've been working with an elder in my community who is one of the last fluent speakers of our language. We've been collaborating on a project that embeds words and phrases into textile pieces. Not as labels or translations, but as part of the visual texture itself. The words are woven in, sometimes legibly, sometimes not. You might look at a piece and recognize that there's text in it, but not be able to read it unless you know the language. The idea is that the language is present whether or not you can access it, which is how it feels in the community right now, still there, but harder and harder to hear.

James: That sounds remarkable. We look forward to seeing it. Claire, thank you for your time.

Claire: Thank you.