Indigenous Creatives Roster

I am a painter and beadworker, and I grew up on the Shoalwater Bay Tribal reservation, located on a rural corner of the Olympic peninsula. I moved to Seattle in 2019 where I worked primarily in museums and gained knowledge to bring home, and I moved back to the reservation in November 2023. Much of my work is inspired by the experience of growing up on traditional coastal land surrounded by my tribal community, and then the transition to life away from and back to those roots. I currently live on the reservation where I am fortunate to be the tribal librarian. While I have a background in painting, during the time I lived in Seattle I began to learn to bead. My chicha (grandmother) Lorraine Anderson was a master beadworker, and she passed away when I was young due to Alzheimer's, so I didn’t get to hear her talk about her memories while we were on this planet together. I started beading out of homesickness, because I wanted to understand her better, and to reconnect to my heritage while living off reservation. It became a meditation and a life line. These beaded paintings are how I capture individual moments of how my life now fits into this ancient coastline, through a practice that connects me to my heritage and community. The work examples I am submitting are my attempts to convey how it feels to “relive” memories of certain places of significance on these lands.

[email protected]
Tokeland, WA