The following text is condensed from interviews which took place on July 29th, August 19th, and September 9th 2021 via telephone with Couzyn van Heuvelen speaking from Bowmanville, Ontario, located on the traditional territory of the  Huron-Wendat, Mississauga, Haudenosaunee, and Chippewa (Ojibwe); with Kristy Trinier speaking from Amiskwaciy  Waskahikan (Beaver Hills House) – Edmonton, Alberta, a meeting ground for many Indigenous communities, including  the Cree, Saulteaux, Nakota Sioux, Blackfoot and the Métis Peoples; and Vancouver – the unceded land of the Coast  Salish peoples–Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō and Səlílw_ ətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm  (Musqueam) Nations. This text was commissioned as a part of the exhibition, from the earth we grow, curated by  Matthew Kyba in association with the Visual Arts Centre of Clarington, Ontario. 

K: To begin, Couzyn – can I ask how you began to recognize your path as an artist?  

C: Artwork has always played a large part of my life, even when I was young; life as an artist was always an option and presented as a possibility.  

Being an artist is pretty closely linked to identity for me. When I was young we would travel up north in the summers; it’s not easy to access the place where I am from. To fly there, my mom would make crafts and sell them, to provide for our airfare home. I think that was her start, and it was influential to me as a kid. We grew up making art, and making the objects around us: I thought that was normal for everyone. When I was older I realized it was rare to grow up in a family of artists. 

K: Those early experiences, visiting your home in Iqaluit, Nunavut – can you share more about what you witnessed your mother making? 

C: My mother was making ulu stands functional objects that were also artistic. If you imagine a board with pegs that attach to the wall, on which you can hang five or ten ulus; and above this, an area where floral designs are painted on the board. These were items that Inuit would use but were not typically available. 

An ulu is a multipurpose Inuit knife, traditionally used by women. There are different ulus for different purposes. We use them while eating, as cutlery; for cleaning hides and scraping the hides; and for pattern making and cutting into the furs for clothing like mitts, kamiks (boots), or amauti/amautiq (adult parkas which can also carry infants or young children). As you can’t cut hides with scissors, an ulu is used; and also, on the backside of the parka to cut into individual animal hairs for complex pattern-making and designs. Ulus is a super common, quotidian object found in each home – it is something distinctly Inuit and there is no substitute for them. Families have collections for ulus, so hangers are useful to display their collection in their homes. 

An important part of this was that she was making things for other Inuit. Many Inuit create artwork and crafts for a  living: that means making artworks for a Southern market. I think it was a good example of where she was making work for Inuit, other people in Iqaluit. Now I am seeing these connections, as I also make work considering my Inuit community up North. 

K: Every artist has their own way of connecting to the community – and it is a particular way that reflects where they are from, and their sense of who their family is.  

C: I think community shapes your identity: you learn from others and it helps form who you are. Up North there is more of a sense of collective identity: this is a place where you live and where your relatives are. When I was really young in Iqaluit, I thought my mom knew everyone. We couldn’t walk down the street without bumping into someone she knew: Elders, family, and friends. There was a sense that we had connections all through the town. 

As far as living down South in Ontario, there was no reflection of myself or my culture here. This difference is a reason why I make work for my community up North, as being Inuk really was a factor in becoming an artist. I had so many examples of family there who were artists, who made clothing or had creative outlets. 

K: When the place that you consider your primary home – Iqaluit – is not reflected back in the community where you were living in Bowmanville: this is a challenge.  

C: Absolutely, yes. Being an artist was connected with being Inuk and it was a way to be a part of that community at a great distance. We grew up with a lot of Inuit art in our home: many prints and carvings. Though I didn’t see Inuit artwork often outside of my own house, in Ontario – rarely in public spaces.  

K: As your career as an artist evolved, what materials were you drawn to – and are these the materials you are working with at the moment?  

C: I enjoy learning about new materials and understanding what potential it has. I want to create artwork from every material that I have access to.  

Different materials have varying connotations, you will have a different impact from each choice and I like to explore this. This is why I can jump from working with aluminum to glass, resin and plastics to stone, steel or whatever seems to suit the project.  

K: Commonalities found in your practice include working with layers to form the artwork: using highly technical processes, such as casting techniques. It can be hard to imagine the inverse of a form – the reverse – which is kind of necessary to anticipate what the object will be when it is released from the mould. 

C: Building on skills that I have, you need to recognize the method relating to a material choice. Creating an object can begin in wax or clay, and then it transfers to another physical material like ceramics or cement before arriving at the final artwork. It is easy for me to imagine the form of an object and also its position within space.  

I’ve always had a solid intuition of how a material would behave – even if I haven’t worked with that material before, I understand how to handle it and know how it will respond. Continuing to explore different materials lends itself to picking up techniques quickly – like some people learn languages. As far as mould-making, or any process in making an artwork which involves a lot of steps. 

I have to consider the end before I begin: there is so much planning and research. Working through all the different variables in my mind makes it easier when working with a CNC router or a digital environment because you conceive the artwork first in a virtual space and then execute it into a physical form. 

K: Every material has its own vocabulary, and it takes skill and time to learn with experimentation. I’d like to know more about how you think of the artwork and its position in space as many of your works have significant scales of size or duration of temporal experience.  

C: Our relation to things and objects fascinates me. As a sculptor, I concern myself with careful consideration of each object: like a fishing lure or hunting implements or tools. They are important objects, functionally but culturally as well. I can explore and think through each object as it represents more than just its physicality.  

Changing the scale or including a new material reference when making an artwork, is a really good strategy in reconsidering our own relationship to objects. There is an impact in addressing scale for fishing lures that I have created: Walrus Lure (2015) wax-cast in silver, is a walrus skull but shrunk down to the size of a fishing lure; while Nitsik 13 (2013) is expanded in scale and made from rope and ceramic, but materially referencing carved bone.

I can make those fishing lures for the purpose of fishing but it doesn’t help me to talk about lures in the way that I  want to talk about them. What is the difference between a lure that you bought and a lure that you made? There’s a  big difference. Someone encountering that object for the first time might think a little deeper about that object, and see it in a new way. When I enlarge a lure to the size of a person, you change perspective: you can’t imagine using it for its intended purpose. 

K: Yes, you begin to realize what a sophisticated design a lure requires: it needs to be able to flow through large amounts of air and water at speed, and also balance the tensile forces or the torque of the line, and weight of the fish or animal on the line once caught. Although it is small, it has to traverse a large distance.  

C: It has to perform all of those things and more – it has to be appealing from the point of view of a fish. A lot of store-bought lures are so different from the hand-made historical examples of Inuit lures that you will find up North,  created from bone or teeth. These are also appealing to people as well. I don’t mean just that they are interesting objects and that’s why historical hand-made lures are in a museum – but that at one time it satisfied a person, and what they might like in a lure.  

These are the kind of hypothetical questions that go through my mind when I see a hand-made and functional fishing lure, and there are parallels there in how you think about making or looking at an artwork.  

K: Regarding the importance of design for large-scale artworks suspended from a ceiling – there are many design considerations to keep it up there safely over time.  

C: Each work has thousands of little decisions that need to be made along the way. You are trying to consider every aspect of an object from its conceptual intention, how to display it, the physical limitations of the material, how to have the material behave the way you want it to, and how it ultimately will look at the end.  

Which decisions are the most important ones? What do you spend the most time considering? You can get so involved and a little bit lost in the important details or elements of the artwork. I’m not necessarily trying to perfectly replicate things at variable scales: I want you to read more into what the lure is, what it sustains, the rituals around it.  

K: Often you create ‘hybrid’ works to express this sense of being ‘in between’, such as Qamutiik (2014), referencing quotidian Inuk objects with essential functions together with found objects – sleds with pallets; or conflating the meanings or references of two disparate objects such as the artwork you completed recently for the INUA exhibition in Winnipeg, Sealskin Rug (2021), made from wool but relating the importance of seal in Inuk culture. 

C: I like to bring two objects together and balance the combination of their important qualities. In the work Sealskin Rug (2021), I can explore our relationship to seals, and more specifically, to sealskin. I am looking at the language of rug-making. I'm following that process: wool is a great choice for that piece because it is the standard for higher-quality rugs.  

I created the sealskin rug with a tufting machine on a stretcher – following the process of rug-making while at the same time, referencing the way you prepare a seal skin, by stretching it on a braced 14’ rectangular stretcher frame.  When it was complete I cut the rug off the frame and shipped it. But one of the important elements of that piece is that it was stretched on a frame in the same way as a sealskin – these little considerations inform the way the work gets made, and how it can be perceived. 

Utilizing all the techniques that you are familiar with, the things you see and what you are exposed to; it all creeps into the making of an artwork. If I am making a work while thinking about sealskin, I will use hide tanning techniques because that’s what’s right in front of my mind. Even if there are other ways to do it, why not use those processes and bring them in? 

K: Conflating those objects merges all of the contexts of histories and technologies together. There is a real beauty when one work can hold space for both sets of traditions and associations.  

C: I am thinking about my family, Inuit community: we eat together. If we have a feast and we have a lot of food to share, we will eat together on the floor – it’s something that happens quite a bit, so I was thinking in those terms.  This work is acting like a sealskin rug but it is large enough for a whole family or a group of people to sit together and eat. It behaves in a way that provides comfort, behaves almost as furniture but it is more suited to Inuit lives. We use sealskin for comfort and for clothing. I don’t know where the piece will end up and how it will get used, but this is what I was thinking of when I made it.  

There is a really strong relationship between the seal, the sealskin, and the feast. I imagined this kind of beautiful moment where everyone is gathered around eating seal—we are nourished by that animal and supported by that animal. This last year and a half during quarantine, we are isolated and stuck at home. Those things become extra important: furnishing your home where you are spending all that time.  

Here I am working and can’t travel; thinking of the future and moments up North that I have to look forward to – what I was longing for and missing. The desire to provide support, an imagined use, was driving me to make the work.  

All of these things factor in; beyond the method of approaching materials, there are so many considerations of how and why the work gets made, what it means, and what it could be. You kind of figure a lot of it out along the way.  

K: Most artists have an audience in mind when they make an artwork: who might experience their artwork and who they wished might be able to do so. I’ve listened and learned from artists such as Tanya Lukin-Linklater, who makes work for her ‘primary audience’, her immediate kin and family. Lauren Crazybull deliberately chooses to paint  Indigenous people that she wants to see recognized in the world. These are powerful acts in addressing work to a  specific audience; who do you have in mind when you make an artwork? 

C: I make artwork for other Inuit. As a sculptor, many artworks I have created are very large in scale. There are few spaces up North that would be able to support an exhibition of large installations, let alone the transportation barriers and logistics issues that go along with it. I have created works like Avataq (2016) – inflatable sealskin hybrid objects, anticipating the possibility of presenting the work in an exhibition up North. But usually, I am presenting work in exhibitions down South, where only a very small percentage of the audience would be Inuk. Few of the people I make the work for may ever see it.  

I think it is more important to make the work you want to exist and make it for the audience you care about; there is a possibility your intended audience may one day experience the work. I am making work for my Inuk community and that makes it important to me, which gives me the energy to do it. It is a conscious choice. 

It is common for artists up North to create work for an audience that they do not know: a lot of Inuit artists make work for Southern art markets and there is a lack of gallery spaces in Iqaluit. It is necessary to create spaces like Qaumajuq, the new Inuit Art Centre in Winnipeg, but actually up in the North - so that Inuit artists have a place to place to present their work in their own community without it being an export for somewhere else. 

For me, I am really lucky to be able to choose my audience and making work for other Inuit is really powerful. If I am making it for people that I love, I am going to work harder at it. As for others that experience the artwork: they might not have all the experiences to understand the work fully but I don’t think that is a negative thing, there are always references common for all to enter the artwork. 

K: All of that is a perfect grounding for the work you are currently creating for the Visual Arts Centre of Clarington. 

C: Yes, a lot of young people will experience this work – it is the same region where I went to school. Inuit art is not a  part of the educational curriculum, so I have an opportunity to reach a number of youth and share broadly an experience of Inuit art and culture.  

K: What is your studio like currently, Couzyn? 

C: It looks like a barn from the outside: at one point it was a welding shop but now it is a studio. My father was a  welder, and he utilized the space for his workshop and for storage of farm implements and tools, a tractor, things like that; it’s pretty big. I converted the space into a studio after my father passed. I apprenticed with my father as a welder’s helper after high school; and it’s a good space, familiar, and fully equipped for metalwork.  

K: A welder’s space is just perfect for a sculpture practice: the right doors, and flooring for that type of work.  

C: Exactly. You learn to weld in University with introductory sculpture courses, but I was well versed in that when I  arrived. It helped me to have those skills and I was able to focus on considering metal and techniques at a higher level. Then you have more options when you are ready to make artwork.  

I think you could make a practice out of any one skill if you had that kind of focus. I respect people who do one thing  and stick with it, because there is a level of mastery there. But I do prefer to learn many skills that are transferable.  Some artists have their artwork production fabricated by technicians but I do like to learn and produce works myself.  

K: What is it like for you to present work in the public realm, as opposed to the more mediated space of a gallery?  Without the typical gallery support of didactic panels or exhibition docents to explain the artist’s intent – it certainly is a more immediate way of experiencing the artwork. 

C: Exactly, I think my practice does come alive when it is situated outside of a gallery space without those layers of  additional context. I think it’s a good thing. When I am looking at art in a gallery, I still look at the artwork only, first.  That way I have my own initial impression and reaction, to have an experience of the work with my own  understanding first, and then seek out additional information about it. But I think it is really valuable to see an  artwork without too much context. You are much more likely to have a broader audience in public space rather than a gallery space.  

K: What is a work that you think was really successful in the public realm?  

C: That would have to be the Avataq (2016) balloons: they have been presented in many different public situations. It is an approachable artwork: people already have celebratory associations with balloons – they know their movement, and can interact right away. It doesn’t take much research or an art history background to enter into this work, and you might not have all of the experiences to understand the full concept of the artwork right away, but it is open for all people to encounter.  

K: After that initial engagement, on a deeper level, what concepts do you wish people would discover in Avataq?  

C: Those who have questions and approach the work with the idea that it is an inviting and playful piece, can participate in the broader conversation about seal hunting practices, relationships with animal and food resources,  and the connections to traditional practices of hunting within our community.  

Working in public space gives me the opportunity to create work that doesn’t exist: a different type of Inuit art that most people have not encountered before. There’s a large Inuit population in many cities across Canada: Toronto,  Montreal, Ottawa, etc. I have an opportunity to create artwork that other Inuit might encounter in these spaces far  from home, which is important to me. 

K: Tell me about the process of creating a public artwork for The Visual Arts Centre of Clarington this summer.  

C: I am having some waterjet cut pieces of metal fabricated, and it will become a physical form from a source of digital drawings. The work has evolved from my initial ideas – and it might change form again as the work is completed. The artwork will appear as a set of fish steaks: cross-sections of an Arctic char fish. 

I weigh different ideas, and what is best to communicate, what is interesting. For me, the envisioning of the artwork,  the concept, evolves together throughout the entire process of developing the artwork.  

The sculpture of fish steaks is solid steel: physically heavy, but with a visual weight to them as well. I am going to blue them, to patina the surface of the steel so it appears to be black (a process that delays its oxidation, where the metal becomes rusted). Likely they will be set on a low poured-concrete plinth in an outdoor setting.  

K: I have been lucky enough to receive an Arctic char. What does this gift represent at this time: mid-pandemic?  

C: It is really hard to be away from my family who is living up North. It is only now that people are beginning to travel  – just a little bit. I have been missing these connections with those I love. My sister was only able to fly down recently,  after nearly two years.  

The role that food plays in this is important: when people come down from up North, they bring with them a cooler  full of frozen food. That is kind of the only access we have to country food – our food sourced from up North. It has  been a long time since we were able to travel, to receive any foods sourced from home.  

Travel restrictions were imposed and therefore immediate access to Northern food is limited, especially here [in  Bowmanville] because it is very hard to find any country food in any other way. Food is important; it brings everyone  together: it gives you a sense of place, especially when you are far from home.  

Access to food in Inuit communities is still so important – even more so in communities where the price of food is exorbitantly expensive. Inuit food security is a big issue across the North. Country food like Arctic char is essential and it is sometimes difficult to access and eat. At certain times of the year, it is some of the only consistent and healthy food available for a lot of people. With few other options for food harvesting locally, there is a lot of scrutiny about how, when, what animals we can harvest locally and eat – without a full understanding of what life is like in a  Northern community and how hard it is to consistently have food available in a harsh climate.  

Communities in the North are reliant on food to be transported in, which makes that food very expensive. Clean  water and healthy food are something that all people require – but when it comes to Indigenous communities, we  need to prioritize the protection of the ecosystems, habitats, and areas where local food is able to be independently  harvested. I shouldn’t have to point to the fact that access to food up North is a major issue, but it is still a critical  issue. 

Arctic char is, for me, a personal experience of fishing and going to the river with family. Spending a day together outdoors, and then sharing the food. Char reminds me of those people, that experience being together, and also the experience of when people travel and bring food with them as a gift.  

Providing food is an essential practice: it is a way of caring for others. That’s why this artwork is important for me, on  a personal level and what drives me to make this particular sculpture. From there, it has other layers of meaning and  associations that each will bring to the piece themselves.  

K: What do you think that youth, in your southern community of Bowmanville, will encounter with this public  sculpture? Food is so universally important. 

C: Whatever cultural background people are coming from – there will be a level of understanding of what shared food  means. Each culture centres food with a special significance. Youth will be able to relate to my experience of food and  how it connects me to my family, and culture up North.  

They can also think about what food means to them – how they share foods, and especially food that you might  consider a staple of your culture. I hope that it opens an awareness of what it means to have a connection to food,  and access to certain types of food.  

Maybe in bigger city centres, it is easy to access everything. Typically, now, you can access food from all over the world, special ingredients needed to make particular foods. But it is still very rare to find a place to access Inuit food.  

There are a few places in Toronto where you can order Northern fish or seals, but my experience has been that this food is only available when family comes down to visit. It is so special when they arrive, bringing with them a cooler full of food. Then we feast and share it together: it’s this entire collective experience that is captured in the artwork.