A series of images created by an Anishinaabe artist in Sault Ste. Marie will soon be prominently displayed at cultural sites in the city’s downtown core as part of Ontario Culture Days.
Lucia Laford — also known by her Anishinaabe name, Waawaaskone Kwe — was one of eight artists chosen by the province-wide festival to highlight their work through its Creatives in Residence program, which is now in its fifth year.
The end result is a multi-site art installation entitled Dibaajimo. She tells a story. where Laford uses her Woodland-style visual art to speak to the process of reclaiming culture and the ‘Indigenization’ of city spaces.
“One of the most important things for me is to Indigenize spaces and decolonize spaces,” Laford told SooToday earlier this week.
Laford will have her art pieces displayed on banners at four locations well known to locals: The Sault Ste. Marie Museum, Canadian Bushplane Heritage Centre, James L. McIntyre Centennial Library and the Ermatinger Clergue National Historic Site.
The idea came to Laford and the team at Ontario Culture Days when they started thinking about Indigenizing spaces in the city’s downtown, as a way of pushing the project further by doing something that people don’t see a lot of in Sault Ste. Marie.
“We started thinking about spaces traditionally where Indigenous people are not centred, and are usually pushed out of those spaces — we thought about museums, libraries, historical sites,” Laford explained.
The murals that Laford is known for locally would’ve taken a lot of time and effort, so she instead opted to create four paintings with acrylic paint on smaller wooden boards, with the goal of digitizing and enlarging the works in order to place them on banners in each space.
Laford and fellow Indigenous artist Taylor Jolin scoped out all four sites in the Sault, where they engaged in conversations with the directors of each site in order to learn about what those institutions mean to them.
“All the directors of each place, they were so willing — they were like, ‘yeah, let’s just put it out front, we want people to see this when they come in.’ I’m very grateful for that,” she said.
Laford — the daughter of prominent local artist John Laford, who died in 2021 — says that every image on all four of the pieces directly relates to storytelling, utilizing underlying themes of love, kindness and kinship as opposed to other Indigenous artists who are “more in your face with their slogans and themes.”
All of Laford’s works for Ontario Culture Days will have a singular theme based upon one word, such as the work entitled Dibaajimowin — an Anishinaabe word for a story or narrative — that’s set to be displayed at the Sault Ste. Marie Museum which features a black-and-white image of an Indigenous man smoking a pipe.
“From the pipe smoke comes an image with all sacred items, and it’s in vibrant colours. I just wanted to think about how so many settler viewpoints see us as from the past, and how harmful that is for us — and for them, really,” the artist said.
Growing up in Toronto, Laford was acutely aware of the lack of Indigenous representation and the fact that her identity wasn’t reflected anywhere in the city at the time.
“It made me really sad. It had deep consequences for me in my life,” she said. “In the Sault I want to create more representation. For non-Indigenous people, I just hope it sparks a dialogue.
“I would hope that anything Indigenous would inspire anybody non-Indigenous to learn.”
Laford anticipates that Dibaajimo. She tells a story. will be available to view at all four sites sometime within the next week. A pair of artist talks with Laford are scheduled to take place later this month, as well as a pair of walking tours of the art installation where she will talk to the public about reclaiming culture and Indigenizing public spaces.
“On the walking tours, I’ll take whoever is there to each of the sites, and I’ll explain to them the symbols and the meaning, and why I did what I did and how it relates to each site,” she said.
Members of the public interested in participating in the free events can register at the Ontario Culture Days website.