A Tlingit House Screen: Un-folding All Ways
Organza, chiffon, ostrich feathers, vintage trims, polyester thread; 2025.
7’ W x 6’ H x 1” D

A Tlingit house screen depicting the mythic creature of contortion. House screens are customarily painted and carved of cedar by men, their shape conforming to the clan house, with the imagery communicating clan histories, often featuring supernatural beings. Utilizing historically domestic materials and techniques, such as commercial fabrics, notions, and appliqué, female-gendered forms and motifs are reframed as monumental. Light, opacity, and transportability are implored to acknowledge female-coded practices as sites of cultural retrieval and continuity. Un-folding All Ways is a monument to marginalized populations and their oftentimes quiet practices of resilience and resistance.

A Tlingit Totem pole: Tending the Undergrowth
Oil, found paper, board, cotton canvas, poly cording, framing; 2025
Pole: 6’4”W x 12”H x 15″ D; Install with mattress: 6’9”’ x 24″ H x 20″ D]

A Tlingit totem pole rests horizontally on a pillow top mattress. Men customarily paint and carve animals and humans into totems, which are erected to tell histories, memorialize events, and/or assert dominance over a region. They have become an icon of the Indigenous Northwest Coast Peoples, their perceived value aligning with Western notions of artistic excellence. Non-traditional floral and seaweed representations are painted in intertwining, translucent layers across this record-keeping column to emphasize the ignored importance of relationships with the non-human world. The pole has been lowered with care to metaphorically level systems of power.

Narrative

This installation includes two pieces: a house screen and, well, a single totem pole.

The house screen is made not of cedar, but of sheer organza—layered in bright colors, trimmed with feathers and non-traditional materials. It plays with air, with light, with shadow—shifting as the viewer moves. These aren’t just aesthetic choices; they reflect a layering of influences and a refusal to replicate tradition uncritically. The screen’s weightlessness resists monumentality. It opens space for breath, for reinterpretation, gesturing toward cultural continuity that is rooted in care, rooted in responsiveness, and the freedom to imagine a future shaped by relationship—not rigidity.

This house screen is at least three times smaller than customary ones, which are carved in cedar with symmetrical formline motifs depicting clan crests or supernatural beings that embody ancestral knowledge. They have this profound presence, even in an otherwise empty clan house. Totem poles are similarly carved and painted with crest figures, telling stories, often asserting cultural presence or domain. A tree is cut, shaved, and planed on the back so it can be carved lying down, horizontally. A master carver and several apprentices usually complete the pole in about a summer— and this time is widely acknowledged as a time of healing and connection not just for the artists, but for the whole community. These works are made through reciprocal protocols that honor the interdependence of people, land, and spirit.

Both house screens and totem poles are male-gendered art forms. While they’re not exclusively reserved for men, there are few women participate in the carving and painting practices of the Northwest Coast. And though Indigenous art forms from all genders have been appreciated by traders, collectors, and institutions, it’s the carved, monumental works that most closely align with Western definitions of “fine art.”

So, female-gendered art forms—textile, woven, utilitarian—have not received the same validation or support. This inequity shapes which practices are economically sustainable and which ones are not. Because male-gendered forms like carving and painting have been recognized as “fine art” within capitalist markets, their ceremonial protocols are often allowed to remain intact. They are seen as both spiritually significant and institutionally valuable. And in contrast, female-gendered art forms—when viewed through a Western lens as decorative or domestic—have been stripped of their sacredness. Their roles as generative knowledge systems, healing practices, and community-centered technologies are minimized, if even acknowledged at all. And this devaluation disrupts the cultural and spiritual lifeways these practices sustain.

So I’ve created a female-coded house screen and just one single totem pole—employing customarily female-gendered mediums and motifs to revision male-gendered forms, not as metaphor or parody, but as reclamation. The house screen features an asymmetrical depiction of a supernatural being — a woman contorted, make of the sun, moon, and stars — suspended in space, her body surrounded by foliage that merges oceanic and terrestrial plant life. The totem pole form is collaged with paper squares, each cut from vintage homemaker  manuals—texts that were once used to transmit knowledge to isolated housewives. And painted over these are futuristic floral motifs—layered, cubist, and blooming beyond linear form. And these visual decisions reflect the entanglement of past and future, and suggest that cultural continuity isn’t just about preservation—it’s about transformation.

By re-gendering these forms, I’m not only challenging dominant ideas about what counts as fine art— I’m reaffirming female-coded creative labor as a site of ceremony, community knowledge, and cultural healing. What does it mean to center a traditionally male form around female-gendered materials and ways of working? And how might that shift our collective understanding of what is sacred, what is powerful, and what is worth preserving?

When work coded as female is treated as love, and male-coded work as labor, cultural continuity becomes a gendered burden. Participating in ceremonial, nourishing, or “domestic” creative practices often requires a higher volume of privilege—not because the work demands it, but because dominant systems have positioned these practices as culturally optional. So, time, validation, and support in participating in these practices aren’t guaranteed— and they must be claimed or already held. 

And that situation limits not only our access to culture, but culture’s access to us.

Beading, weaving, embroidery—aren’t just functional or beautiful. In many Indigenous contexts, they are spiritual technologies. They hold ancestral knowledge. Yet even with this knowing, the artists—often women—are expected to give freely, while carvers are compensated as professionals.

The house screen is in the shape of a Chilkat blanket, yet has been inverted to match the pitch of a customary screen—pointing upward instead of down. And the totem pole has been laid to rest on a mattress. That pedestal of rest—soft, domestic, intimate—becomes a site of rethinking power. It challenges the verticality of monumentality, the elevation of certain knowledges over others. And it speaks to a necessary leveling—a laying down of inherited hierarchies, not only from our colonial past, but from within our own traditions. This gesture invites us to be selective about what we carry forward, and to imagine a future not built on preservation alone, but on transformation.

This project questions the logic we’ve inherited. It asks: what happens when we monumentalize the invisible labor of care, of maintenance — the invisible labor of community-tending? What if we treated these practices not as sentimental, but as vital?