Re Awakening Stories 24 X 24 inches Acrylic on Fir

LauraLee K Harris was born in Toronto in 1956 and started to draw and paint as a young child. She attended Forest Hill Art School, The Art Gallery of Ontario and the Ontario College or Art and Design. During that time she explored woodcarving, collage and other traditional and non-traditional media. In 1988, she held her first solo exhibition. In 1994 she met an Uncle who informed her of her native heritage. This discovery became the catalyst for a large body of unique work: a compilation of her life returning to the teachings and traditions of native life and learning the ways of respect, honour, truth, history and many of the traditional teachings of the Earth. In 1996, disillusioned with mainstream art, she wandered down to the basement and sought out a piece of wood that had haunted her. Like a child, she had always seen imagery in wood furniture. The disillusionment combined with the new knowledge of her ancestry brought her to painting on wood.

Windigo 19 X 6 inches Acrylic on Pine

Artist Statement

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, 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.