Carrie
Allison
EXPRESSION
Plot, 2018
Installation: beadwork on linen, grass
“A lot of my practice is about honouring through making … Beading is a way of reconnecting not only with matrilineal roots but also with physical objects and devoting time to thought.”*
Carrie Allison’s practice is an act of contemplation, memory, and resistance. In Plot, she pays tribute to sixteen single grass plants, of which she has made beaded portraits. Each specimen, shown at a specific moment in its lifecycle, is honoured as a living being. However, these grasses are also more tragically symbolic of the colonialist productivist vision of living things as resources. They are a type of grass blend, which forms dense, uniform lawns, allowing for close-cut mowing, commonly used for golf courses, but requiring human intervention, without which they tend to get tangled and die. The beadwork pieces are accompanied here by a small bed of this grass blend grown in a bin for the duration of the exhibition, drawing our attention to the care required to maintain life and to the planting of grass as a way of affirming one’s ownership of a plot of land. Referring to its partitioning into allotments, the title comments on the colonial division and appropriation of territory, an idea reinforced by the hanging of the beadwork pieces in a grid.
*Missy LeBlanc, “The Quiet Resistance, interview with Carrie Allison”, Canadian Art (11 September 2019). Online: canadianart.ca/interviews/the-quiet-resistance/.
Carrie Allison is a visual artist of Nêhiýaw/Cree, Métis, and European descent based in K’jipuktuk (Halifax, Nova Scotia). She grew up on the unceded and unsurrendered lands of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh), and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Nations. Her maternal roots and relations are based in Maskotewisipiy (High Prairie, Alberta), Treaty 8. Allison’s practice responds to her maternal nêhiýaw/Cree and Métis ancestry, as she thinks through intergenerational cultural loss and acts of reclaiming, resilience, resistance, and activism, as well as notions of allyship, kinship, and visiting. In her practice and through visual discussions, rooted in research and pedagogical discourses, she seeks to reclaim, remember, re-create, and celebrate her ancestry and to challenge the colonial status quo.
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Carrie Allison, Plot toho bead on linen, 2018
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Carrie Allison, Plot, toho bead on linen, 2018
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Carrie Allison, Plot, toho bead on linen, 2018