Greetings -
I hope that you are doing well, or at least surviving this time. I have spent the last 10 months living on land in rural Saskatchewan. During this time I have been walking around this land every day, noticing little details and gradual changes. I am slowly getting to know this land better. These are not dramatic events, but rather understated nuances and subtleties. I am preparing a series of postcards based on what has caught my eye on any particular day. Missing having contact with people, I have decided to send out postcards of my time here. So if you would like to receive some of these, let me know, with your mailing address. My best, Linda |
Postcards will be sent to the first 40 submissions.
Once we hit this number we will stop accepting submissions and replace the submission form with a thank you. |
Linda Duvall is a visual artist living on Treaty 6 territory and the Homeland of the Metis in what is now Saskatchewan, Canada. Any work that Duvall creates there is done with an awareness and honouring of this complicated history.
Duvall’s work exists at the intersection of collaboration, performance and conversation. She addresses recurring themes of connection to place, and grief and loss.
During the pandemic, Duvall walked an 80 acre section of land, for about 2 hours every day, taking photographs of whatever she noticed. This land is protected native prairie grassland near the South Saskatchewan River which leads directly to Wanuskewin, a traditional Indigenous winter hunting and gathering site.
From this time, Duvall developed a series of postcards, based on specific moments during her walks. Each postcard contained a brief text on the back and an image on the front. Each text has some relationship to the image, but doesn’t replicate information contained in the image.
She sent these postcards intermittently during the pandemic. She sent to people with whom she would have liked to have met and talked. She mailed 10 different postcards, and then stopped mailing when things seemed to be opening up. But she has many more composed and ready to be prepared for printing. And she is continuing to think through the implications of mail as a medium for distributing ideas.
Most recently she has constructed boxes initially devised as framing devices for the postcards. But as she has developed the boxes, she is understanding the box form as a potential extended narrative form, and as a means of merging the postcards with other relevant artifacts like small sticks chewed by porcupines, seeds, etc.
At this point Duvall is still experimenting with various objects that relate to the postcards, and that can be inserted into the boxes. This is another case where Duvall begins a project and continue to shape it - in this case it will probably continue for many years to come.
Although she hasn’t done this step yet, Duvall has hired 4 different musicians to sing to this same land in gratitude and in healing. All of the singers have some history with the prairie grasslands - an opera singer, an Indigenous drummer, and a Irish folk singer, and all but one have participated in other projects with Duvall. Each singer has the option of beginning with words from the postcards or not.
Duvall’s work exists at the intersection of collaboration, performance and conversation. She addresses recurring themes of connection to place, and grief and loss.
During the pandemic, Duvall walked an 80 acre section of land, for about 2 hours every day, taking photographs of whatever she noticed. This land is protected native prairie grassland near the South Saskatchewan River which leads directly to Wanuskewin, a traditional Indigenous winter hunting and gathering site.
From this time, Duvall developed a series of postcards, based on specific moments during her walks. Each postcard contained a brief text on the back and an image on the front. Each text has some relationship to the image, but doesn’t replicate information contained in the image.
She sent these postcards intermittently during the pandemic. She sent to people with whom she would have liked to have met and talked. She mailed 10 different postcards, and then stopped mailing when things seemed to be opening up. But she has many more composed and ready to be prepared for printing. And she is continuing to think through the implications of mail as a medium for distributing ideas.
Most recently she has constructed boxes initially devised as framing devices for the postcards. But as she has developed the boxes, she is understanding the box form as a potential extended narrative form, and as a means of merging the postcards with other relevant artifacts like small sticks chewed by porcupines, seeds, etc.
At this point Duvall is still experimenting with various objects that relate to the postcards, and that can be inserted into the boxes. This is another case where Duvall begins a project and continue to shape it - in this case it will probably continue for many years to come.
Although she hasn’t done this step yet, Duvall has hired 4 different musicians to sing to this same land in gratitude and in healing. All of the singers have some history with the prairie grasslands - an opera singer, an Indigenous drummer, and a Irish folk singer, and all but one have participated in other projects with Duvall. Each singer has the option of beginning with words from the postcards or not.
|