Anew

Coast Salish artist Susan Point was born in British Columbia, on April 5, 1952. Since birth Susan has lived on the Musqueam First Nation Reservation in Vancouver, B.C.
Susan was honored to be chosen to create a piece of art to be presented to the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC, a gift from the Government of Canada to celebrate the opening of the National Museum of the American Indian.
Also, she was recently elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of the Arts, and has been presented with a National Aboriginal Achievement Award in recognition of her work as an artist. Susan is realizing her vision that will no doubt inspire artists and admirers for generations to come.
In her artist's statement she writes: "I, a Coast Salish artist, devoted a great deal of time to researching, trying to revive the art form, attempting to educate the public and my children to the fact that there is another form of native art unique to British Columbia." In addition to reviving Coast Salish design, Point together with a small group of artists including Stan Greene, Rod Modeste, and Floyd Joseph, among others, have brought out aspects of Coast Salish culture that had not previously received much scholarly attention. Point's incorporation of Salish mythology into her prints has made evident great cultural differences between Salish society and the crest-oriented societies of the north. Thus, Point has directly contributed to a greater awareness of not only Coast Salish design principles, but also Coast Salish culture in general.
Initially, Point's work relied heavily on the cultural artifacts she encountered through her scholarship. She carefully copied designs from spindle whorls, rattles, combs, and mat creasers, slowly drawing out the language of Coast Salish design (Duffek 1986:3). Trigons, ovals, and crescents were used to render a two-dimensional image on paper, in much the same way they would have been used to create a carved image on a spindle whorl. With many of Susan's earliest serigraphs, it is possible to compare the print with the object, often a spindle whorl, which inspired it. In most cases, Susan has distilled the original representation down to its basic elements, rendering her design with "a subtle stylization, cleaner lines, and a greater integration of forms in her two-dimensional version of the piece" (Duffek 1986:4). In her representations of designs found on spindle whorls, Susan has managed to retain the sense of motion that would have been inherent to a spindle whorl in use. Her compositions, even those that are not derived from her study of spindle whorls, contain a sense of movement in their repetition of images and patterns. There is a flow to her lines that suggests more than an understanding of historic design elements; they manage to convey some of the essence of the original object itself. Over time, Susan began to experiment, with her compositions, her use of color, her media, and her personal style. Throughout, however, her use of a Coast Salish design vocabulary has remained constant.