 One of my main concepts is that through touch, through listening, through watching, that you can have a connection to the place that that material come from with poetic indicators of where the work is trying to take you. Durande, I'm at Ushia. I am an interdisciplinary artist and member of the Tel-Tan First Nation. When I was 18, I went back to Canada after about a year of traveling and enrolled in Getamax School for Northwest Coast First Nations Art in Hazelton, B.C. I studied there for two years under Master Carver Vernon Stevens. I wanted to go to Emily Carr. It was the only school that I applied to, and I went into sculpture to really determine my direction. I was mentored by Brenda Crabtree. She was very influenced on my practice. In Emily Carr, I took the opportunity to explore in different materials, ceramics, printmaking, doing some further exploration in paint. It really opened up that door for what materials speak. My work has always been performative. One of the pieces of fabrication was a bit of a replication of a regalia piece made from dentellium shells, and I was really thinking about questioning value in the work because I was fabricating a kind of ancient currency. On a model or on a form, it was very void of the kind of meaning that I wanted to give to the work, and so it needed to be on my body. What I'm doing differently in my practice from Emily Carr, it's specialization, and I also built conceptual foundation, and that foundation is what I drew upon when I went to grad school. And now, a lot of my practice, I call it conceptual because it doesn't matter what material that I use, as long as it's talking about these really important issues that I want to speak about. And right now, it's to do with mining, with decolonial design. And then I also work in a real material connection to industrialized land and body. When I was at grad school, I started to make the right rock rattles. They are meant to be machine, a way that they were activated by the people who were playing them and listening to them and, you know, feeling the vibrations or a way to hear the land. There was a book that came out about this ethnographer who had visited the Tel-Tan people. It really exposed me to a new kind of Tel-Tan art, and I've been pursuing and revitalizing Tel-Tan art practices and styles since 2008. I'm doing a lot of research right now on abstract Tel-Tan shapes. I've used them now for a few projects that I'm calling Tel-Tan Futurism. When I'm beading, I'm working out bigger picture ideas through making and through my hands, and so that's one of my grounding philosophies. Some of the best advice that I got while I was at Emily Carr is to make the project suit you. My advisor, Julie Nagam, is co-curator for the Insurgents Research and Show at the Winfrey Park Gallery. A piece that I submitted is called Agenda, Push It. Moose High, that's connected to a contact mic, so people can touch it. They can resonate the land. I'm trying to talk about this indigenous perspective and also place the indigenous body in the conversation.