This piece was a commissioned piece that came out of the Co-Creating a Culture of Stewardship: Cloth, Plants and Place field trip as part of this year’s Artist Brigade.

Artist Statement

The Remembering Mothertongue Project is an exploration of the legacy of our interdependence with animals and the land; it was only through engaging in functional relationships with our ecosystem that our ancestors survived.

To explore that, we engaged with ancestral artforms that connect us to the land, animals and people around us, and then used that experience as sourcework for artistic creation.  All the materials we used were living entities before they became fibres and textiles, and they each hold teachings that lie between them and the hands of those who work with them.

“Land, language and craft are strands woven into our DNA;
Ceremony is the weaving together again.
How can we allow ourselves to extend from and be woven further by them?”

To gather works for the Zine, I sent the prompt above to the artists whose work you will read inside. Two artists were commissioned to create a piece in direct response to learning sheepskin tanning and corn husk weaving, while the rest responded from their own experience and interpretation of the prompt.

Remembering Mothertongue Zine

Remembering Mothertongue

Artist Bio

Sunkosi Galay-Tamang (Suna) is an Indigenous artist of mixed ancestries (Tamang clan / Himalayas, Dënesųłı̨né-Métis / Turtle Island, Jewish-Ukraine, Germany, Scotland) born on the ancestral homelands of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh and Səl̓ílwətaʔ Nations.  She believes in art as ceremony and the body as pedagogy, and is passionate about reclamation of ancestral skills, language and physiological wisdom as pathways to sovereignty and communal health.