New Artist in Residence, Megan Samms!
Please join us in welcoming to EE Studios our first Artist in Residence of 2024: Megan Samms! Megan will be with us from February 2nd – March 16th, 2024, and will be offering a workshop and a talk while she’s here, so keep an eye out for those events! Read on to learn about Megan’s objectives during her residency.
“My art works are continuing development in the direction of decentering Western documentation and mapping traditions, and toward anticolonial documenting practice. I am interested in what mapping and documentation looks like without Western cartographers and extractive industry involved. I am interested in what maps look like with kin-network and intimacy informing the shapes of place and strength of sense in direction, as the leading foci. Can a map be created as a “thing” that is experienced? Can a map to a particular point be created in an atmospheric way, by evoking the senses until the map-reader knows they have arrived to the attended place? What does a multi-functional map look like? I wonder and imagine what documenting and record keeping look like when it’s us, the people of the place who live here day-to-day in embodied relationships with each other and the land, keep the notes and focus the perspective. I am interested in expressions of place, expressions made by places in the forms of flora, fauna, water, textures. How a place makes more of itself. How this = home(s), or at least the feeling of a home place.”
“While residing at Eastern Edge in January 2024 I will work on documenting place points, drawing from Easterly habitats. I will make documentations likely by writing and making floral and faunal observations in drawings and/or photo.
While at EE, my intention is to study place through day-to-day observation, by walking, and to use photo and painting as methods of documentation of (my) movements and paths made on land. I may use textile methods as well not limited to dye work and paint making, knitting, and weaving. To contextualize my knowledge about maps made in or about Ktaqmkuk, I will contact the Rooms before arriving in St Johns to arrange access to maps in their collection; I want to study what those maps document, how they’ve been made, when, and by whom.
Tangible makings may be large format visual journals, small textiles, paint made from found materials, small installations made of found materials, various paintings and drawings.”
Megan Samms (she/they) is a Mi’kmaq, Nlaka’pamux, and mixed settler multidisciplinary artist who works in mediums involving textile, natural dyes and inks, paint, words, mapping, and photo. They’re also a regenerative and community based farmer — practice in sustainability, in all ways informs her process.
Depending on time and place, they find themselves feeling that Nothing Matters or Everything Matters; so, she locates her practice in the holy sweet middle, holding hands with meaning and working to make more of it. They don’t always articulate it well or right, but that’s what practice and research is for.