{"id":86064,"date":"2025-09-02T10:09:23","date_gmt":"2025-09-02T14:09:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artmur.com\/artists\/heather-shillinglaw-natsede-les-gens-arrivent\/"},"modified":"2025-10-31T14:30:03","modified_gmt":"2025-10-31T18:30:03","slug":"heather-shillinglaw-natsede-les-gens-arrivent","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/artmur.com\/en\/artists\/heather-shillinglaw-natsede-les-gens-arrivent\/","title":{"rendered":"Heather Shillinglaw : Nats\u2019ed\u00e9 (Les gens arrivent)"},"content":{"rendered":"
September 13 \u2013 November 1, 2025
\nOpening reception: Saturday, September 13, 2025 from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m.
\nHeather Shillinglaw: Nats\u2019ed\u00e9<\/em> (People are coming)<\/p>\n

Text by Andrea Valentine-Lewis<\/p>\n

Land is like us, and we are connected conceptually to it \u2013 our bodies and minds are like neurons with electrical pulses. Flower stems and leaves connect, ghost rivers and lakes interweave with the North Saskatchewan River. The eagle eye is stitched into deer hide, blended with paint, ribbons, fabrics, hand beading, yarn tufting, and thread painting. As I assemble this, [I] encourage us to remember, remember, remember the land as it once was \u2013 remember my ancestors and how they lived within the landscape.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2013Heather Shillinglaw<\/p>\n

Shillinglaw is an Edmonton-based multimedia artist working across needlework, beading, and collage, employing both traditional and contemporary modes of making to share the oral histories from her ancestors of Scottish, French, Anishnaabe, N\u00eahiyaw\u00eawin Cree, and Denes\u0173\u0142\u012fn\u00e9 heritage. Her multilayered family history initially inspired her artistic journey, as she learned about how the nohkoms\u2013her grandmothers and great-grandmothers\u2013were instrumental as translators for the Hudson Bay Company due to their knowledge of several Indigenous languages and the intricacies of the landscape. Women\u2019s stories and teachings continue to be a central motivation for the artist\u2019s practice.<\/p>\n

Nats’ed\u00e9 (People are coming) presents a new body of work inspired by both the Ministik Mihkin\u00e2hk (\u201cTurtle Island\u201d in Cree) creation story, as well as the histories of ancestral harvesting sites and ethnobotanical knowledge of her homelands told by her mother, Elder Shirley Norris\/Shillinglaw. The artist carried out additional research, consulting with ecologists and biologists about the historical and continuous environmental shifts imposed on the landscape. This research became the blueprint for building out her map-like tracings of her ancestral histories.<\/p>\n

Each composition recites an important familial story around four central and sometimes overlapping themes: residential schools and Shillinglaw\u2019s drive to reclaim lost languages in her works\u2019 titles; family, specifically the women and their knowledge of trails for trade; her mother and grandmother; and the ecology of Turtle Island, including ecological loss due to ongoing resource extraction and climate change.<\/p>\n

For Shillinglaw, each coloured thread, ribbon, and stitched poem reveals an important aspect of a land-based story: white threads throughout the blue threads of the water signal ecological loss or \u201cghosts in the land\u201d; red ribbons mark trails, also known as the \u201cpockets in our skin\u201d; and orange ribbons and red Xs mark the location of residential schools and unmarked gravesites.<\/p>\n

Shillinglaw\u2019s works exist in a space rich with possibility\u2013between loss and reclamation, between tragedy and hope, and between stories past and storied futures.<\/p>\n

My elders say that knowledge and stories are developed to preserve culture, and art is the key. [It is a] way for us to move past intergenerational trauma and is a tribute to our ancestors, as history that is not forgotten lies within their troubled lives.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2013Heather Shillinglaw<\/p><\/div>\n

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