Creative Minds: Materiality and Indigenous Sovereignty
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October 10 @ 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm
Join us for a conversation with Mi’kmaw artist and lawyer, Cheryl Simon! Learn about Simon’s approach to Indigenous material culture through her perspective as a Mi’kmaw e’pit [woman], and how traditional Mi’kmaw art forms relate to Indigenous and collective rights.
Throughout the conversation, Cheryl will be weaving a basket with techniques passed down to her by her uncle, Elder Francis Jadis, who has been making baskets for 60 years. As an artist with a deep connection to quillwork and basketry, Simon sources and processes her own materials from start to finish, exercising her Mi’kmaw rights of cultural material harvesting.
Limited tickets available.
About the Artist
Cheryl Simon is a Mi’kmaq e’pit (woman) from Epekwitk (PEI), currently residing in Halifax, who works with porcupine quills, birchbark, spruce root and sweetgrass.
Cheryl fell in love with Mi’kmaq quillwork as a little girl studying her mother’s collection of quill boxes. She started learning and studying the insertion technique and design upon moving back to Mi’kma’ki in 2007, and launched her business, Mi’kmaq Quill Art in 2011. Cheryl is committed to community education of the artform and has been teaching quillwork workshops for over ten years. She took on her first apprentice in 2015 and opened a short-term studio in Epekwitk in 2016 to begin a program of instruction for three more apprentices.
While Cheryl focuses on traditional quillwork and construction, she also developed a process for accurately depicting the petroglyphs (rock carvings) after visiting the petroglyph sites in Nova Scotia. Over the past two years, she decided to incorporate both traditional designs and the petroglyph technique into the same quillwork pieces. This blending of styles lets her showcase the importance quill size can make in enhancing the detail of the design.
Cheryl was recently inspired by contemporary Mi’kmaq art to move beyond the quill box lids, which influenced her early work to split the design into separate pieces, adding a vibrancy to the designs. She has taught her children to harvest and quill and is excited to begin the process of teaching them the intricacies of designing in the traditional style. She feels that quillwork requires strong connections and is proud that the community of quillers is expanding to include the younger generations.
Image and basket by Cheryl Simon.