Hannah
Claus

In her installations, Hannah Claus creates spaces populated with materials and gaps, establishing a relationship with the land—with water, rock, sky, and plants. Originally created for an exhibition in Secwepemc territory, in dialogue with the curator and artist Tania Willard, interlacings is a floor projection of ornamental motifs featuring images of different edible plants native to that part of Turtle Island. This “carpet” is put into circular motion and travels into overlapping cultural universes and temporalities as it metamorphoses from William Morris’s textile art made in Great Britain in the nineteenth century to representations of Secwepemc flora. Blending colonial experience with Indigenous heritage in a series of sequences and recurrences, the work draws on the history of intertwined plant practices, customs and meanings within the Secwepemc Nation. In her art practice, Claus often engages with specific communities to underline their knowledges, ways of doing and being in the world, that she understands as onkwehowené:ha.