Maria-Margaretta Bouchera memory of you
© Maria-Margaretta Boucher, Like One of your Michif Florals, 2022. Photo : Jake Kimble.
Workshop daphne beads: perler/parler on Thursday, September 21, 2023, from 7 pm to 9 pm
Maria-Margaretta’s residency will focus on the creation of experimental beadwork, video documentation and installation. During her stay at OBORO, the artist will recreate her grandfather’s 8×10-foot tarp used to provide shelter during camping expeditions. The tarp will be constructed of opaque clear luster bugle beads using bead weaving techniques. The slow repetitive labor of this process is reflective of the everyday labour of Michif women in home spaces and home building. This delicate woven beaded tapestry in turn becomes a fortified object of shelter and transformative object of generational knowledge sharing and ancestral ways of knowing.
The work is an auto-ethnographic exploration into Michif parenting and the Michif self-archive. Focusing on her relationship with her child, the artist has documented both sound and visual archival material of her daughter’s first year of life. These recordings will be used to create experimental video projections and soundscapes. The artist explores the interactions of beaded surfaces and structures with imagery and sounds that invoke memory and remembering.
Maria-Margaretta is interested in domestic spaces as transformative spaces of knowledge sharing and art making. While creating pieces for this residency she will also be caring for her daughter, demonstrating that within Michif parenting there is no separation of parent and child/parenting and artistic practice. These practices are always in flux with one another, growing and evolving to make space for caring and love as methodology.
© Maria-Margaretta Boucher, Like One of your Michif Florals, 2022. Photo : Jake Kimble.
Maria-Margaretta is an interdisciplinary Red River Michif Artist from Treaty Six Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. She has ancestral ties to the Métis communities of St-François-Xavier, St. Boniface, Manitoba and St. Louis, Saskatchewan. She is currently making and living on the stolen territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Səl̓ílwətaʔ, and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm Nations. Maria-Margaretta holds a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art+Design and an MFA from OCAD University. Her practice is an exploration of the Michif self archive, autobiographical beadwork and objects of the everyday. Using Métis identity as a place of transformation she questions how memory, personal experience, motherhood, and ancestral relations influence her understanding of self.
