The use of Native motifs in furniture is more than just a visually striking trend. These thoroughly contemporary designs are freighted with meaning, too, Marsha Lederman reports.
Shawn Hunt’s idea for a fireplace to serve as a centrepiece for a West Coast home was to create a place on fire with significant – and sacred – ideas. For the commission, the Vancouver-based Heiltsuk artist, who likes to play with reinterpretations of native stories and extend the mythology into the modern realm, drew upon a favourite tale: Raven steals the sun, which is concealed inside a box. In Hunt’s installation, the fire (the sun) rises from the centre of this bentwood-type box in the centre of the room.
Box of Light is an aesthetic knock-out, but it transcends mere decoration or design; its story elevates it.
“When I create art … I try to do things so you’re initially struck by its beauty and then you’re lured in and there’s multilayers of meaning,” says Hunt, 39. “That’s quite easy to accomplish when you’re using native art because so much of it comes from stories. And when you’re dealing with native art, you’ve automatically introduced 10,000 plus years of culture.”
Hunt’s spectacular installation is part of a growing number of thoroughly modern home furnishings created by or with British Columbia native artists using aboriginal motifs – rich in tradition but contemporary in design. Stunners, such as Corrine Hunt’s sleek, sculptural Salmon Swimming coffee table; Lance Goldy’s illuminated and carved Spirit Series dining-room table; Shain Jackson’s in-demand boardroom tables; Sabina Hill’s envy-inspiring, native-inspired red and black Thunderbird Chair.
Like Hunt’s fireplace, these pieces are freighted with meaning. But contemporary interpretations of aboriginal motifs can be loaded with potential issues too. Whose stories are these to tell?
The question of cultural misrepresentation and appropriation, a huge concern in the popular native-wares marketplace, also takes a seat among these exquisite light fixtures and luxurious chairs.
Sometimes a coffee table is just a coffee table. Sometimes it can represent thousands of years of history, and sometimes it can represent a minefield.
The practice of adorning everyday objects of everyday life in native culture has always existed, and there has been an intense outside interest in these works since contact.
A watershed moment for the commercial application of the art was Kwakwaka’wakw carver Ellen Neel’s 1948 speech to the Conference of Native Indian Affairs at the University of British Columbia, when she called on her people to employ new technology and ancient ideas to fight cheap knock-offs and create authentic consumer-oriented work from which First Nations could benefit economically.
“I believe it can be used with stunning effect on tapestry, textiles, sportswear and in jewellery. Small pieces of furniture lend themselves admirably to the Indian designs,” she said.
Over the next few decades, that idea was embraced by influential modernist intellectuals on the coast, including Haida artist Bill Reid, architect Arthur Erickson, anthropologist Wilson Duff, and Jack and Doris Shadbolt – artist and art curator/historian.
Today, you can find native motifs on everything from rain boots to oven mitts, as detailed in Solen Roth’s new micro-exhibit at the Museum of Vancouver, Artware: Northwest Coast Designs & Everyday Objects. Neel was right on the money; there is a terrific appetite for First Nations-themed functional items in Canadian homes and lives.
Fuelling the furniture trend: economics. Patrons have more money to spend on big-ticket items; and the value we place on meaningful experiences, and possessions rich with interesting stories.
“I see this furniture, having stuff in your own environment as opposed to your knick-knack shelf, as characteristic of our moment – which [values] immersion in some experience or other,” says Charlotte Townsend-Gault, an anthropologist and art-history professor at UBC who co-edited the book Native Art of the Northwest Coast: A History of Changing Ideas.
Komoyue/Tlingit artist Corrine Hunt seems the very embodiment of Neel’s vision. Growing up in Alert Bay in the 1960s, Hunt created her first designs on cloth diapers.
Today, in addition to her jewellery, Hunt’s work can be found on a wide range of items – eyeglasses, serving platters, flip-flops – and furniture. (A career-changing commission saw her co-create the 2010 Olympic medals.)
“I’ve always been interested in not just making art that is for display,” says Hunt, 54.
“What I’ve tried to do is bring the motifs of the culture out into the streets, so we don’t just see tourist items but we see things that I would use.”
For her Salmon Swimming coffee table, Hunt used reclaimed fir and steel, carving the sides so that the salmon appear to “swim” across the floor as the light moves across the room.
Now she’s working on a new, more affordable line of furniture. “I don’t want everything to be in just these grand houses,” she says. “I want them to be in people’s homes.”
We were speaking at a Vancouver craft show, and when I asked how she feels about non-native artists using native symbols in their work, she pointed down the aisle to someone she said was doing just that. “It drives me crazy,” she said.
“It’s not just art,” she explained.
“An eagle is so many different things to so many different people. And bringing the sort of vitality to the art, to its application, has always been very important to me. … When I come out of my Big House I’m bringing that soul with me to what I do. What happens if there’s no soul?”
I asked Roth, a Montreal-based cultural anthropologist who focuses on indigenous art markets, about collaborations between non-native designers and First Nations artists.
She said opinions within these communities range “from people saying we don’t want this to be done at all; we just don’t want our designs to be used by designers for their own purposes – even with the agreement of a specific artist; to, this is great, this promotes our work more widely.” But the artist must be a full collaborator and remunerated properly – and maybe also have the blessing of community leaders.
Sabina Hill’s home furnishings have a contemporary, abstracted First Nations feel and a high wow factor. But Hill, who has worked extensively with these motifs for more than a decade, is not, in fact, native.
A British Columbian, she has long been fascinated with native culture, she explained. When she began thinking about creating furniture with a strong sense of place, “I thought, how could I make my furniture pieces very much about here? Collaborate with the First Peoples,” she says. “And have that as a true collaboration. The motif is very much integrated.”
Hill, 54, has created several lines of what she calls functional art furniture – most recently, her limited edition Harvest Collection, where she applies tanned salmon skins to pieces such as the Prow coffee table, with a design suggesting a dug-out canoe; and drum-inspired side tables.
Hill, who was recently commissioned to create the signing table for the Canadian high commission in London, says she has not encountered concerns about cultural appropriation in her work.
“I think it’s because I [work in] collaboration with the First Nations artists. It is not me designing these motifs and claiming them as my own. The cachet of my company and work is that it is a collaborative effort.”
K’omoks and Kwakwaka’wakw artist Andy Everson, who works with Hill, says he supports a process that sees native artists create the native art elements. “It’s a chance to do something a little bit different; to have my work created in different materials.”
Vancouver Island furniture-maker Lance Goldy, who is not native either, works with a local carver – Noel Brown, who is Coast Salish and Kwagiulth. Goldy handcrafts each piece, determines where the carving would look best, and Brown creates the carving guided by tradition and the client’s desire – to exquisite effect.
According to Coast Salish artist and “recovering lawyer” Shain Jackson, this kind of collaboration works when the artist is a true partner and fairly compensated. This is a key component of the program he recently founded, Authentic Indigenous, which authenticates aboriginal artwork and other products – and is administered, incidentally, by artist Lou-ann Neel, Ellen Neel’s granddaughter.
Roth says this kind of program tackles the problem of “tricky labels” such as the one she saw on an Inukshuk during the 2010 Olympics declaring that it was made by a “native Canadian.” Upon investigation, she learned that meant a person born in Canada.
Even when a native artist is involved, Jackson says it is essential in the collaboration that design does not trump cultural authenticity.
“A lot of people don’t realize it, but our artwork – it’s not like a written language; it is a written language. It’s got some very sophisticated symbolism in it,” says Jackson.
He offers this analogy: “If you look at old Shakespearean writing … it’s this beautiful calligraphic design. If you take that … calligraphy and you mix up the words, it’s still beautiful, but it doesn’t mean shit. It loses all its meaning if you turn all the words around.”
As with Shawn Hunt’s Box of Light, the visual effect is one thing. But it’s the meaning behind the work – the ancient, the sacred, the ceremonial – that distinguishes it as exceptional.
“I love the collaborative process. I think it brings the way we live in our world, in Canada especially, with so many different cultures represented. To work with those cultures, to share different ideas, and see what comes out of it, see what we can represent together,” Corrine Hunt says.
“Sometimes it doesn’t work, because the heart isn’t there. The person is not as interested in the culture and not interested in representing or sharing that culture in a way that is telling a story. And then it’s not a shared story any more.”