10 minute read
ARTIST FEATURE | FRANCIS DICK
She answers the phone “City Morgue,” as I laugh
out loud in response. Francis Dick’s humour is as powerful as her laughter. This soulful and playful Kwakwaka’wakw Artist is passionate about her changing mediums, sharing her Northwest style and being intertwined in music.
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When asked about her experiences in 2020, Dick is very responsive. "Life right now has been challenging; part of the challenge for most people right now is around work. As an Artist, how do I market myself, especially when it wasn’t your goal to become an Artist?”
My response: you get by with a little help from your friends. And as it turns out, friends have stepped up to help her with marketing through online presences like her website www.francisdick.com.
Once you see Francis Dick’s diverse body of work and creative portfolio, you’ll believe that her journey was to include art. As we touch on the discussion of the pandemic, Dick adds, “seems things will be ongoing this way. In between all the chaos and noise, I have my own thoughts. These are truly such strange times – no gatherings, no funerals, no visiting. I think many people are feeling lots of impacts without having access to home territories, family and travelling."
“I normally spend lots of time alone,” she says, “with the added self-isolation, maybe I don’t hate people as much as I think I do.” She laughs as she shares.
Dick has been busy throughout the pandemic. She’s been working on two collaborative music-based projects including these stunning custom handmade guitars in Victoria. Dick and Glenn Taylor have been working on these pieces for months; piece by piece, designing them and putting them back together.
Taylor is a local musician, a guitarist in fact, and a fine wood finisher. These two creatives brought together a beautiful contemporary collection of Northwest custom designed and hand-built guitars. They are both looking forward to showing these unique one-of-a-kind guitars via a live performance featuring these works of art – so stay tuned for those details. "From my love of music and involvement in the musical community, I was inspired to produce these guitars," she says. "Especially the portrait of famous Blues Artist Robert Johnson, did you see that one!”
Dick had been working on a jewellery line before pandemic. Most Indigenous Artists use hand carving tools, but she hurt her hand, making that almost impossible. Instead, she designed a line of laser cut jewellery from traditional images and shapes to her Northwest style, some influenced by her love music. Dick added that she bores easily so she loves to try different mediums and outlets.
She has also created pieces of functional furniture highlighting wood, glass and metal. Dick still feels challenged to capture the essence of the people that intrigue her and translate that into her art. “By putting honour and spirit into your work, that is the tradition and honours our culture.” Dick reflects on her Yalis’ (Alert Bay) and Kingcome Inlet ties and cultural position as a Hamatsa.
In the earlier years, Dick finished her degree in Social Work and took a placement working in Kingcome Inlet. She found it very difficult and moved back to Victoria to continue her education, and never left. She lives away from family and always enjoys the reconnection; she recently lost her father and nephew. With times being difficult, she stepped in to help these losses by selling some of her work. “To love and to care and hold their pain with them… was overwhelming but beautiful,” she noted about her family’s losses.
In the end stages of her father’s life, she would do a three-second canvas – random lines; pulling ravens, thunderbirds and other traditional images; Dick expressed, “you can see them with your soul.” These three-second canvases sold within a week at a gallery – a buyer had full connection with the pieces instantly. Deep from the heart and soul, from where the Creator lies, Dick pulled these stunning and creative works out to share and honour her loved ones.
When asked about her art fusion of traditional and contemporary, Dick responds that it is a story that is told through music. Dick wanted to create performance art and brought her idea to the Newcomb Theater in Victoria. She was told to get a script together; so she did, and took one performance practice and then presented – the show sold out. Dick continues to want to grow through music, especially continue to work with musicians in the Victoria area.
Raven Guitar
Artwork Francis Dick Woodwork Glenn Taylor
BEING HUMAN
DREAMING OUR WAY THROUGH
JAMES L. ANDERSON
In everything I have written, between the lines is the whisper of a dream. A dream that no matter how desperate, dark and hopeless things become, we are going to find the light. We are going to survive. That 10,000 years from now Human Beings will still be here… on this earth… in a golden glory civilization of peace, enlightenment and perfect harmony with universe we cannot even imagine today. All around us in this tortured insanity you and I are living through today this is simply a ridiculous and an impossible dream. It makes no sense. You can’t get there from here. It cannot be so.
It just happens to be true. But it is going to be one HELL of a journey. You and I live in a world where who we are and our precious lives themselves have no value except how others can use and profit from us. In the world at large no one can truly and deeply CARE for anyone else and the sad truth is that we cannot truly care for anyone but ourselves. It is not the way it should be, but it is the way it is, now. This is why there can be no lasting social, economic or spiritual unity…and no final peace, Human equality or forever love, and no co-operative, collective society can ever truly succeed on this earth until we finally learn to CARE for each other like we obsessively, fanatically care for our own private, “solitary one” lives.
We are still not yet fully evolved. None of us. But, we dream things.
Fire…the wheel…the “round’ earth, the “heliocentric” universe, the One God. All secretly maturing beneath the surface for Ages, until they were “Born” in the collective Human mind… And then, the world changed forevermore. somehow found the path to unimaginably transform and discover a New Way to be Human on Earth, and our children’s children lived to walk this earth into the future. We have always done this before. It is how we have survived. We dreamed our way through.
In what little we understand of how this magnificent universe evolves, there is an ascending tower of progression in what we call Communication that manifests in secret germinating glory sublimed somehow towards the now unseen and unknown cloaked DESTINY of Life and universe, everywhere.
Little do we now know that this is the ongoing secret process which defines a Universe that is the CONTINUUM and womb that is creating the astounding metamorphosis of as yet unborn perfect total Union… which we un-evolved creatures are now unaware that everything is incomprehensibly fulminating towards.
We now incorrectly call that sublime, hidden metamorphic process Energy, gravity, force, field, LIFE or communication…and there is nowhere, anywhere that this fulminating evolution has no presence. It breathes all around us everywhere…now, although from our “solitary one” yet ignorant lives we are now simply oblivious to it. Ever more highly liberated and “evolved” lifeforms manifest higher (unifying) methods of what we perceive as Communication. From protoplasm to the ‘thinking” apes, there is clear evidence of higher, more sophisticated and interwoven forms of interconnection and communication with the universe beyond…clearly evolving closer to one day perfect, total Union of all creation.
way through again. Perhaps the lesson we must learn in these desperate times clinging to the edge hanging by a thread above the dark horror of Oblivion and deadly forever extinction is that we must once again evolve or die.
We can only survive by evolving another Giant Leap forward with an astounding, higher form of perfect communication…that allows us to survive by impossibly evolving the unimaginable ability to know and LIVE each others’ separate, “Solitary One” lives.
In that Higher, more evolved form of ”communication” Human Beings will then become a New Species, having created once again A New Way to be Human on this earth.
Everything we now think we “know” will change. And we will have evolved into another world… Where we can survive, again…Leaving all this insane madness behind us, forever. Look all around you now. See somehow beyond the hate, war and monstrous inhuman savagery today. Beneath the surface everywhere You and I are dreaming our way through… once more. We can survive. Believe in it, and make it so. You and I must evolve a New Way to be Human, once again. When we learn to “share” life together, everything we now live and love will change forever, and all of our children’s children will walk this earth and survive in a New Human World where we truly CARE for each other. We will have finally become a Unified Life Force and a FAMILY of Humankind.
Imagine That. Where do we begin? What if the problem is simply that there is a secret, fatal flaw hidden at the root of all logical and rational present Human thought that is keeping us all from that incredible evolution? A fatal flaw buried so deep that no one anywhere has yet even suspected it is there. And it is this secret, invisible fatal flaw that is now destroying our civilization, our world, and our lives today.
And finally, suppose that this deep, fatal flaw is essentially invisible to our present conscious mindset because it is concealed in the way our logical minds function? It now lurks invisible hidden in the way we reason and make sense of everything, hidden in the fundamental fabric of the way we think…every last one of us.
We are ALL Global fools. We all either evolve the outrageous ability to “SHARE” life itself and escape this insane, inhuman civilization today into a new Human world, or none of us will survive.
Just imagine this. This is the new dream we must envision and make come true, so our children’s children will live to survive in a Magnificent new Golden Age in the future where we have dreamed our way through… again.
© James L. Anderson,Campbell River, BC, Canada, Earth. www.james-l-anderson.com
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