An Innu from Mashteuiatsh, Sonia Robertson is dedicated to work on memory rooted in the healing of wounds and traumas—both personal and those inherited from Quebec and Canadian colonialism. Drawing on her practice as an art therapist, the spiritual connection she forges with the land lies at the heart of her artistic approach.
In the installation Territory to Share (2015), she suspends a circle of threads above two baskets containing feathers and shells. The feathers of the Canada goose, an iconic migratory species, evoke the nomadic way of life of her people, the Innu, while the shells—collected in Mi’kmaq territory, where the work was first presented—serve as raw material for wampums. They thus preserve collective memory and the bonds between clans and nations. Within this richly symbolic context, visitors to the exhibition are invited to reach into the baskets to attach an object of their choice to the thread structure, thereby leaving less and less space for further contributions. Their action becomes part of the story the artist evokes and also gradually depletes the raw material provided. In this way, the work invites an awareness of the consequences of colonization and our consumption of resources, while reenacting a gesture of offering central to First Nations rituals, symbolizing the beginning of reconciliation with them.
With Umiku Nekaui-Assi / Blood of Mother Earth, Sonia Robertson refers to territory in the sense of “Nutshimit,” which the Innu poet Joséphine Bacon defines as a space of renewal “without limits, without walls, without an address, without borders.” The installation was presented at the Val-d’Or Exhibition Center (2014), the Joliette Art Museum (2019), and then in Montreal at La Guilde during the Présence autochtone festival in 2021. At each of these events, the artist invites women from Indigenous communities in the territories where the work is presented to participate. She invites them to embroider words on paper calling for the healing of the water, which she places at the foot of a river of tulle masterfully unfurled within the exhibition spaces. In this way, the artist brings to the forefront of her installation the natural territory where the institutions hosting it in turn are located. She highlights the proximity of the Harricana and L’Assomption rivers, as well as that of the St. Lawrence River. True to her culture, she invokes and reveres these waterways and the entire life cycle they represent as the life force and spirit of Mother Earth. She invites us to do the same, drawing inspiration from her animist culture—a model of resilience and compassion that is essential in the face of today’s upheavals.
Discover Sonia Robertson’s artistic approach :https://puamuna.com/ (in French)
Visit the Grantham Foundation for Art and the Environment’s “Art and Environment Capsules” webpage : https://www.fondationgrantham.org/capsules-art-et-environnement (Capsule #16 for this text uin French)