Cheryl L’Hirondelle shares how her interdisciplinary art and music practice brings together relations between language, land, and the more-than-human.
Filmed March 26, 2024 at the Halifax Central Library.
Cheryl L’Hirondelle (Cree/Halfbreed; German/Polish) is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist and singer/songwriter whose family roots are from Treaty Six: Papaschase First Nation / amiskwaciy wāskahikan (aka the city of Edmonton) and Kikino Metis Settlement, AB. Her work investigates and articulates a dynamism of nēhiyawin (Cree worldview) in contemporary time-place incorporating Indigenous language(s), music, audio, video, VR, sewn objects, the olfactory, audience/user participation and community engagement to create immersive environments towards ‘radical inclusion’ and decolonisation. As a singer-songwriter, she focuses on Indigenous language sound shapes and contemporary song-forms as methodologies toward survivance.
Cheryl was awarded two imagineNATIVE New Media Awards (2005 & 2006) and two Canadian Aboriginal Music Awards (2006 & 2007 as part of M’Girl) and is a recipient of the 2021 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Art. She also exhibits, performs and presents nationally and internationally, and is currently a PhD candidate with SMARTlab at University College Dublin.
