Stitching My Landscape
Maureen Gruben
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Treaty Space Gallery, 1107 Marginal Rd.
This work was showcased in the Treaty Space Gallery as part of the larger Worried Earth exhibition that extended throughout the Port Loggia and Treaty Space Gallery.
Curator Erica Mendritzki offers:
"Maureen Gruben’s Stitching My Landscape proposes the possibility of a different kind of intimacy with the surface of the earth. The photograph shows a work of large-scale land art created by Gruben in 2017, in which 111 ice holes were connected by 300 meters of blood-red broadcloth zigzagging across an expanse of frozen ocean south of Tuktoyaktuk. This piece reverberates with personal and cultural experiences, drawing on Gruben’s memories of her brother tossing bloody strings of seal gut out onto white snow, as well as recalling the traditional Inuvialuit practice of hand-stitching facial tattoos.
In Gruben’s work, landscape and body, ice and skin, thread and gut, become metaphors for each other, emphasizing the intimate connection of human, seal, and Earth. Her act of puncturing and stitching the ice reads as both wound and reparation, underscoring the human ability to not only destroy, but also tend to our environment. In its poignant beauty, it offers us an opportunity to meditate on what it means to heal and be healed by nature."
