The Feast - Johnson, VT

Hand-burning tribal seals on wooden plates for the next Feast in Muncie, Indiana was the main focus of my residency at the Vermont Studio Center. Here, I started tracking the time I worked on each plate. The Jicarilla Apache plate took me over 5 hours! It tested my patience and made me reconsider why I was doing this by hand. The evening I completed it, I also purchased a table-top laser engraver.

In honor of the full moon and Indigenous Peoples Day (aka. Columbus Day) I organized a Full Moon Fry Bread Feast for all of the amazing artists I had met. I used the plates I had worked on while at the residency and with the help of new friends, made and served fry bread with Ioway Tribe honey and freshly picked raspberries. 

I received mixed feedback from participants and visiting artists on the importance of doing this work by hand. One person told me that because I had spent so much time working on them, she felt obligated to give her time and attention to the material and discussion. Others thought there was no reason I shouldn’t use available technology. Overall, I felt like the emphasis on labor highlighted the destruction of Native cultures rather than celebrating their individuality, ingenuity, and resilience. I decided I would be using that laser engraver, because Indians use technology, too!