touching listening

Artist Tania Willard’s articulation of the ways in which land art is “informed by Indigenous art practices and in the very least inspired by our lands,”(1) underscores the importance for non-Indigenous artists to consider the colonial conditions through which they address and access the land. Whether identifying one’s artistic practice through frameworks such as land art, eco-art, landscape painting, or other forms, concerns of appropriation and extraction persist. While the term ‘extractive’ denotes the reduction of nature to commodity, resulting in the exploitations of the mining, oil, and gas industries, it also refers to modes of settler perception and reading. Writer Dylan Robinson describes how such perception and reading instrumentalize Indigenous knowledge “through a model of extractavism that resources Indigenous content”(2) Questions of how to read, regard, and listen to the land and water are vital not only for artists, but for the future of our planet.

Artists whose practices thoughtfully intersect with this complex terrain include Kristin Nelson (Winnipeg) and Barbara Meneley (Regina), both of whom recently presented concurrent exhibitions at Regina’s Neutral Ground Contemporary Art Forum, collectively titled, Contact / drink. Nelson, a settler identifying as a queer artist with a disability, explores different forms of labour in relation to the body and the land. Meneley investigates Canadian national imaginaries and her position as a self-defined contemporary settler/settler descendant/treaty person in relation to the land.

The first thing one encounters with Nelson’s drink (2018) is the artist herself—clad in a uniform (black skirt, white shirt, black bowtie) one might associate with food service industry workers. Standing beside a water cooler, she offers gallery visitors white, cone-shaped cups from a silver tray. Struck by the thick cotton weave and waxy texture of the cups, I take one, fill it with water, and drink. Nelson gestures for me to toss the empty cup in a nearby bin. When I hesitate, she firmly insists. Mumbling that I want to keep it to think with, I slip around the corner to find the gallery space filled with the intricate apparatus by which such cups are produced: a warping reel, a floor loom, and a station for cutting, waxing, and ironing. Before long, Nelson has left her server’s post, and engages the warping reel, dividing one spool of white thread with mesmerizing skill, to prepare for weaving the fabric. Alongside this operation, piles of discarded cups spill onto the gallery floor.

While it is easy to interpret drink as offering a singular example of relations between mass-produced objects and environmental damage, other strands of meaning are woven throughout Nelson’s labours. If the marked whiteness of her textile operation evokes the streamlined purity of quick consumption endemic to mass manufacturing infrastructures, it also touches on the “whitewalling” conditions of art institutions.(3) Nelson’s acts of service and production work against the grain of such infrastructures, deepening the material interfaces and social contracts of consumption. She offers a model for an economy by which labouring bodies are of equal (or more) importance as the things they produce.

drink includes four photographs which link it to versions of the work Nelson developed and presented during (and after) a 2017 residency at Riding Mountain National Park, Treaty 2 Territory. The photographs depict Nelson at various outdoor locations, producing the cups and using them to offer water to the public. Working through a desire to contribute to ongoing discourses of Canadian water crises, she noted the conundrum of being situated within the enclave of Canada’s National Park system(4) beside a body of water called Clear Lake from which one cannot drink.(5) Her ecological concerns are further embodied in drink through the inclusion of audio traces of such troubled waters. If one listens closely—places an ear directly inside one of Nelson’s cups—one can hear what sounds like lake waters gently lapping against a shore. Tiny speakers placed within several cups offer fragile sonic waves which meet mid-air with the sounds of Barbara Meneley’s work: a soft clack of marine rocks, wind brushing the branches and roots of Prairie rose bushes, the peep of Bank Swallows.

Meneley uses the contemporary dance technique of “contact improvisation” to respond to the land. Contact (2018) features video projections documenting performances enacted over a two-year period in unceded K’ómoks First Nation Territory on Vancouver Island, and outside Saskatoon on Treaty 6 Territory.(6) Two large projections face each other across the gallery. On one, Meneley can be seen entering at the right edge of the screen, making a slow roll to the left across a rocky shoreline. Her elbow encounters a boulder that will not budge. She pauses, reconsidering her approach. A few minutes later she negotiates an exit—toes last to leave the screen’s edge. Such mid-distance views of her figure embracing the slippery, kelp-coated rocks alternate with perspectives from a GoPro camera attached to her head. These disorienting tumbles—gritty rock close-ups interrupted with flashes of sky—unsettle one’s geographical bearings.

A different dance simultaneously unfolds through the projection across the gallery. Responding to the raked angle of a bank cut into the Prairie topsoil, Meneley’s gaze seems drawn inward, sensing the vulnerable striations of sand and clay. Her movements balance a sense of respect with one of curiosity. She fans her limbs, momentarily appearing like a starfish fallen to earth. She rotates out of view, letting sky and swallows animate screen space. The openness of her process allows an attentiveness to the land on its own terms, dislocating colonial and nationalist mappings which circumscribe knowledge of place. Meneley has described how she continues to carry within her body a sense memory of the rocks and sandy earth.(7) Her immersion in the moment, and the horizontal drift of her process, seemed contagious during the exhibition opening, compelling visitors, myself included, to sit or lie on the floor beside her videos.

The silent intensities of Nelson’s and Meneley’s performances intimate the gravity with which they each approach their entanglements with land, water, history, and the present. Their careful, hands-on labours could be considered modes of listening—more haptic than optic; more inquisitive than acquisitive. Such touching listening pushes against the ongoing white noise of extractive acts and perceptions.

The author would like to thank Kristin Nelson, Barbara Meneley, Sigrid Dahle and Anthony Kiendl for their comments and feedback.

Based in Regina, Treaty 4 Territory, Joanne Bristol is a third-generation settler who uses art and writing to find respectful ways of relating to the land.

1. Helen Wong, “Tania Willard: Balancing Act, Between an Outsider and an Insider,” BlackFlash 35.1 (2018): 17.
2. Dylan Robinson, “Public Writing, Sovereign Reading: Indigenous Language Art in Public Space,” Art Journal 76, no. 2 (2017): 99.
3. Aruna D’Souza uses the term “whitewalling” to refer to recurrent, systemic white supremacy within art institutions. See Aruna D’Souza, Whitewalling: Art, Race & Protest in 3 Acts (New York: Badlands Unlimited, 2018).
4. The Parks Canada website describes such sites as, “natural jewels” and “wild places”. See https://www.pc.gc.ca/en/pn-np/introduction.
5. This account was shared through an email exchange with Nelson, December 9, 2018.
6. On K’ómoks Territory, Meneley’s work was produced through a Comox Valley Art Gallery residency; on Treaty 6 Territory, through the In the Hole residency with artist Linda Duvall.
7. This account was shared through a conversation with Meneley, January 12, 2019.

This article is published in issue 36.2 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue