Tania Willard, Future Prayers, 2023, cyanotype of tobacco leaves, paper, synthetic sinew, 152.4 x 162.56 cm, City of Burnaby Permanent Art Collection. Photography: NK Photo courtesy of Pale Fire Projects.
TANIA WILLARD
PRACTICES OF SUFFUSION
12 OCTOBER 2024 - 11 JANUARY 2025
The entwining natural forces of sunlight, wind, flora, moisture, and fire suffuse together into the containers of Tania Willard’s recent work. Based in the Secwépemculecw Territories, these conditions have interwoven personal and artistic repercussions. Their combination can create the perfect exposure conditions for Willard’s UV prints but simultaneously affect the conditions for growing berry bushes and enabling wildfires. Last year, Willard and her family were affected by wildfire alerts during the Bush Creek East wildfire in the B.C. Interior. Practices of Suffusion exists in a spirit of reciprocation, responding to the Earth’s communications in flames, hazes, and winds. Rather than approaching these forces as something to harness or control, Willard considers these natural forces as living collaborators.
Practices of Suffusion presents Willard’s recent anthotype, cyanotype and berry prints, all created through the exposure of light-sensitive materials to the sun. Anthotypes emerge after applying a plant-based, photosensitive emulsion to paper that develops in the sunlight for weeks at a time. Willard’s use of this historical form of camera-less photography embodies her reciprocal approach to the natural forces that create her work. Often depicting plants like tobacco that are grown on her land, Willard refers to these anthotype and cyanotype prints as double exposures. The first exposure comes from the sunlight that grew the plant and the second exposure develops the print in the sunlight.
In another series of work, concrete poems were made in collaboration with the artist’s son, squeezing Oregon grape berries onto the page to form stanzas and lines. The berry juice originating from Willard’s own harvesting on her land, remains unfixed on the paper and continues to change through UV exposure. Located in the windowed Upper Gallery, Willard slows this process by diffusing the sun that continues to permeate the gallery through window coverings in the colour of the Fireweed flower.
Scrawled across the gallery wall is a poem written by the wind. In her previous work Liberation of the Chinook Wind (2018-2021), Willard allowed for wind speed and its directional data to write poems sourced from the raw text of environmental policy documents. Like her other projects, Willard approached the dynamism of the wind as a person with its own autonomy. Not only does Willard allow insight into what the wind might want to say, but she offers a way of collaborating with the elements of wind, fire, water, and earth outside of settler colonialism, asking how attitudes might change when the world is treated as our relations.
Curated by Adam Whitford, Associate Curator & Exhibitions Manager
Tania Willard is a mixed Secwépemc and settler artist whose research intersects with land-based art practices. Her practice activates connection to land, culture, and family, centering art as an Indigenous resurgent act, though collaborative projects such as BUSH Gallery and support of language revitalization in Secwépemc communities. Her artistic and curatorial work includes Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture at the Vancouver Art Gallery (2012-2014) and Exposure: Native Art and Political Ecology at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe (ongoing). Willard’s work is included in the collections of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Forge Project NY, Kamloops Art Gallery, Belkin gallery and the Anchorage Museum, among others. In 2016, she received the Hnatyshyn Foundation’s Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art. In 2020, the Shadbolt Foundation awarded her their VIVA Award for outstanding achievement and commitment in her art practice, and in 2022 she was named a Forge Project Fellow for her land-based, community-engaged artistic practice. In 2023 BUSH Gallery was named as a Future Studies recipient from Ruth Foundation for the Arts. Willard is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at UBC Okanagan in syilx territories.
Documentation photos by Blaine Campbell.
