“Mamatowisowin defines the methodology used in a quest for vision, where the seeker/artist begins to explore his/her own existence subjectively. By placing ones self into a direct stream of consciousness, the seeker/ the knower / the artist will begin to unfold a greater, inherent understanding of self, by utilizing the methodologies of Mamatowisowin.” Willie Ermine, Cree Scholar; First Nations Education in Canada ; The Circle Unfolds

ARTIST STATEMENT: LAURALEE K. HARRIS

In a traditional sense natural elements from Mother Earth have always been our template for how we live, giving us stories or defining our culture, our rituals, our cycles, our sacred spaces and practices, our means to live. Here I use the grains from a slice of the inside time of a tree, the Standing People, ply’d flat and glued onto board, it is their creation that defines my voice, my work. This becomes a template into my mind’s eye, their spirit telling me what is; I am spiritually moved by this process of finding. But in a contemporary sense; plywood, by its very creation, has its life time of lines frozen for all time as plywood, its spirit ignored in hardware stores, used constructively to build homes, as a barricade against Mother Earth’s elements, or to prop us up away from the earth in beds and chairs and tables, holding us aloof from what sustains us.

But it is from this plywood, from the Standing People that I see and paint, see and write storied poems, occurring as the painting does, automatically: I intuitively follow the grains with what my mind is seeing, only sometimes am I deviating from which the tree grew. The words come as a direct answer from the painting, from the deep searching within me and the work that once grew. Transparently, layer over layer I am painting into its life giving me a deeper understanding which I search my soul layer after layer, for discernment; for this reason the painted insides of the Standing Tree is mounted next to the written insides of me; an honouring of Creation.

It is a Collaboration of sorts, the tree and my mind, storing life from these years growing on Mother Earth. I see and understand its imagery from my visual subconscious, and the knowledge that the Universal Structure, connecting the living and the spirit worlds, are the constructs which inspire me, in turn, to write this vision in poetry. What emerges from this ‘stream of inner space unison’, is an abstract voice, that I understand with an ear to heart knowledge, to the voice of the land, memories of family I connect with my Spirit and respond to the intellect of blood memory, I am guided by self and spirit. I learn from what I reposit, what finds my eyes in grown imagery inside me and the tree simultaneously.

“Mamatowisowin defines the methodology used in a quest for vision, where the
seeker/artist begins to explore his/her own existence subjectively. By placing
ones self into a direct stream of consciousness, the seeker/ the knower / the
artist will begin to unfold a greater, inherent understanding of self, by utilizing
the methodologies of Mamatowisowin.” Willie Ermine

It is a collaboration of creation and life, that I attempt to make sense of life’s mysteries, from my subjective universe. The language of its inner growth, after its time in the sun, earth, air and water, and after growing each ring, a measure of one cycle of four seasons, is counted as one year. After many, is cut down, its years unwound in a continuous life’s ribbon of years, is plyed flat, each ply a frozen snap shot of a year and more as it repeats looking the same, but larger. The unwound life stares into mine looking back at different snapshots, I find a random set of visuals in my storehouse, and land on what image from the tree’s sequential life triggers a random piece of mine.

Knots appear where branches grew and in each, a story of leaving, branching off to reach for sun, maintaining its life from the core, each year the knots grow larger and some years, die off if not enough water or sun. Each knot is a memory of that branch and retains some image, some place marker of where it found life in its leaving and finding. The rings and the knots find in my mind some figure, some cranium or an egg, an animal, some gesture of feeling, some ocean or river, some cloud or sun that my mind gathered along the way and paints into being.

Another circle of life interconnects, when I write the painting’s stories into understanding where I’ve been. And every time another viewer comes to look and see and understand, from their visual memory, they bring perhaps something that I didn’t paint, and another circle of life is connected. Because now the viewer is looking for more, and understanding how to look deeper, into words and images that connect to their inner self, but they also take away another complex understanding: An Indigenous view of comprehension on many levels through a manifestation of knowledge through humans and this interrelationship with our environment.
It is a vision that looks deeper inside, into the self and the life of the standing ones, from a complex culture that had more wisdom and knowledge understood on many levels in many dimensions. It comes from a subjective culture that understands that everything comes from inside.

“For the Cree, the phenomenon of mamatowan refers not just to the self but to the being in connection with happenings. It also recognizes that other life forms manifest the creative force in the context of the knower. It is an experience in context, a subjective experience that, for the knower, becomes knowledge in itself. The experience is knowledge.” Willie Ermine

We carry this knowledge inside, like the seed and the memory of who and what we begin to be. It knows what it’s going to be before it is planted, it knows it is a Spruce or a Birch or an Oak. The seed, is the beginning of creation and it knows what kind of tree its going to be, but what happens after is up to the elements, which is reflected from the weather into how it grows or if it grows. These circles of life connect with the knowledge of life and creation. The knowledge I know inside does not know where I will land with this creation. I don’t know what elements I will have to reach for or what I will find inside me along the way, the painting just evolves. Just like I do not know the future. I take a deeper step into the unknown every time I resolve to paint on a new piece of wood. I have no preconceived ideas of where it will take me, like life, like the way a tree grows, like nature and the wind.

It is in this place I create, I reach for the unknown and find knowledge. And as I work and search my culture, myself and Mother Earth’s Creation with Acrylic washes of colour, I am finding pieces of my lifetime from my core, in the imagery that this other life has gracefully provided and that I gratefully and humbly receive.

I am in awe of the life of the tree, its language, a story all its own, a tongue of knowledge carried in a memory of its growing in droughts and rain, summers of sprouting, years of shade. Its language, could be rolled around in the palm of a hand, planted in the earth, and in your lifetime you could lay under its shade, perhaps hundred times your height, that one of your great ancestors had planted. And when I paint on these creations, I realize that each one is different. No grain, no tree is the same. We are all different and somewhat the same, but a forest lives together.

“Process of self actualization… In their quest to find meaning in the outer space, Aboriginal people turned to the inner space. This inner space is that universe of being within each person that is synonymous with the soul, the spirit, the self, or the being. The priceless core within each of us and the processes of touching that essence is …. called inwardness.” Willie Ermine; Cree Scholar

LauraLee K. Harris draws from her Mixed Blood Native ancestry which originated in Winnipeg as Sioux, Cree, Chipewyan, Ojibwe, Oji-Cree, Assiniboine and Montagnais/French from her Mother and Irish/English from her Father.

I know it inside.