Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill | Counterblaste. 2021
Pantyhose, tobacco, thread, charms, plastic flowers, dried flowers, earring beaded by Cheryl L’Hirondelle, running shoes, beads, rabbit fur earrings, and nail polish.
Tobacco is considered essential to physical, social and spiritual well-being in many Indigenous cultures throughout the Americas. Hill, a Métis artist who lives on the unceded lands of the Skwxwú7mesh, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh peoples (Vancouver), grew up using tobacco for gifting and ceremony, and developed an interest in how the practice has survived colonization, criminalization and capitalism. But, for Hill, its Indigenous usage represents an alternative system guided by an ethic of distribution and reciprocity.
“Counterblaste (2021), is a chimeric figure laying on one side. Her eight breasts are swollen – some painfully red – but she rests contentedly as if having just finished feeding her young. Her head is cradled in the nook of an elbow with her lop ears sprawled outwards and her feet, laced into scuffed running shoes that show the wear and tear typical of a busy mother, are tucked behind. The work’s title references a treatise written by King James VI and I in 1604 titled ‘Counterblaste to Tobacco’, a vitriolic pamphlet decreeing a personal distaste for smoking: a habit his fellow countrymen had acquired in the colonies and was fast becoming a favourite pastime. James’s treatise reduces tobacco to its association as a treatment for venereal disease, describing it as ‘a stinking and unsavorie Antidot, for so corrupted and execrable a Maladie’ – accompanied by his blistering condemnations of ‘barbarous people’, rooted in sexualized, racist hate. As a direct affront to the King’s masculine paranoia, Hill’s Counterblaste gives form to an Indigenous body politic that challenges conquest ideologies. The maligned sexuality of Indigenous peoples and the derogation of the tobacco plant are effaced by the gaze of this confident mother.” ( https://www.frieze.com/article/moma-projects-gabrielle-hirondelle-hill-2021-review)