Flora Weistche | My Grandmother’s Garden – Nuuhkimunihtaauchihchikan. 2018
Flora Weistche has talked and written about the story of My Grandmother’s Garden in interviews and on social media. In these moments, she explains that the premise of the artwork revealed itself through a dream in which her late grandmother urged her to use a caribou hide to illustrate a sprawling floral pattern using beads. The resulting work utilizes these patterns and the material of the side to tell stories from Northern Quebec, as well as of many people and exchanges that she has had since her childhood in Waskaganish.To design this artwork Weistche gathered what she deemed to be most important floral patterns from indigenous elders in her community.
The work both archives the history of this visual culture and activates it anew. The resulting beaded forms symbolize the interactions and relationships between all beings that Weistche has witnessed throughout the three years that she and others worked on this piece. The hide which supports her beaded designs, for instance was gifted to her by her mother and comes from the last caribou that her father had hunted before stopping out of concern for declines in the caribou population. By working with the hide, Weistche honours all beings, both those who are with us today and those who have passed on, human and non-human. Although it was Weistche’s initiative to complete this work, it was her grandmother who asked her to do so, and it is her garden where the interconnectedness of all relations is made apparent. ‒Suzanne Morrissette, PhD (Métis artist, curator, and writer)
After witnessing the devastating decline of woodland Caribou, the year Flora Weistche was born, her father decided to stop harvesting this relative. This decision would mark ways in which she would come to know interrelatedness throughout her life. Of Cree heritage in Northern Quebec, Flora Weistche grew up on and with the Land of Waskaganish. Her family’s last harvested Caribou hide inspired the rebirth of Weistche’s beading practice – one she had begun at the young age of three and yet laid to rest for some twenty years. She was moved to threading glass coloured beads, the messages gifted to her through a dream by her late grandmother Helen. By way of beading, Flora Weistche braids relations crossing generations reaching toward plant, animal and human relatives alike. Currently, Weistche lives and works in the Cree Nation Environment and Remedial Works Department in Tiohtiá:ke / Montréal.