Tlingit Botanical Expressions [ collage sister pair ]
Collage, colored pencil on paper; 22×15″; 2026.
Beyond the political conversations that revealed themselves through my botanical explorations in paint, ink, and weaving—work that helped steady my position within my Indigenous lineage and illuminate the beauty of Indigenous continuity—these studies in material have also served as a kind of training ground. A place to practice being a social activist, a deviant, and ultimately a contributing community member, through slow, embodied decision-making rather than declaration alone.
In this sister pair of collages, I cut a formline-inspired floral arrangement through four sheets of paper at once, with the intention that—when separated from their original whole and recombined—they would lock together like puzzle pieces, retaining memory of their shared origin while forming something new.
These four sheets of paper were gathered over many years. My mother selected the light pink Japanese paper in 2000 to embellish her own collages. The hot pink paper arrived shortly after and has remained part of my mother’s—and now my inherited—collage materials for over twenty years. Last year, during a shopping trip to The Artisian in Santa Fe, I chose the sheer white checkered paper (which becomes nearly invisible in these collages) and the green leaf paper. Simply holding these four papers made me feel very rich—in materiality, in lineage, in inspiration, in responsibility, in love.
The papers were pasted onto watercolor paper that my mother tore and prepared over a decade ago. I assembled the pieces within a rectangular field bordered by thick, untouched white margins, conforming to her collage practice and to the compositional structure I’ve adhered to since learning collage from her in junior high.
Many hours were spent negotiating how the colors and shapes would relate to and differentiate from one another. I struggled to retain the integrity of fundamental formline principles. Working with such delicate materials—papers that expand, buckle, and transform when their backs are coated with adhesive—requires sustained attention and care. These materials taught me lessons in dreaming, determination, confrontation, and eventual surrender. It is within emergent practices such as these that we are able to rehearse life skills in a safe, contained environment, before carrying them back into the world.
