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Graduate Scholarship 2022

Lisa Mayes

University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB

Artist Statement

A Bricolage of Lineages and Landscapes

My practice focuses on the bricolage of colonial and postcolonial diasporic displacement within
the histories of the transatlantic slave trade, indentured labour, highland clearances, and chosen
migrations. As a person of African American, Muskogee Creek, Acadian, Irish, and Scottish
ancestry, I excavate personal archives, in search of missing voices, inherited voids, and family
portraits.

To guide my understanding, I call in cultural theorist Stuart Hall and post-colonial/critical
theorist Frantz Fanon. I then work with archival material, through print, painting, and digital
media to push my capacity of understanding how the materiality of objects and visual culture are
interwoven. This results in self-portraits, portraits of my children, or the portrayal of ancestral
lineages to form a temporality fixed in landscapes. Each beckons to notions of home, belonging
and folklore. Through these gestures, I explore the complexity of negotiating the body existing
with constructs of black, bicultural and multicultural identities on these lands and at this
historical moment. I strive to counterbalance the impact of the erasure of the dominant
settler-colonial cultures on the lived realities of those who embody intersectionality.

Submitted Work

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