221A Interview Series: Eliot White-Hill, Kwulasultun

My art practice is really rooted in honouring and celebrating the stories and teachings that have been passed down through Coast Salish culture, especially by my family like my late great grandmother, Dr. Ellen White, Kwulasulwut. My whole art practice really came when she passed away in 2018. She was such an incredible person—she was a healer, a midwife, a linguist, storyteller, activist… like, she did all of it. When she passed, I realized how spoiled I'd been—being able to just go and sit with her whenever I wanted—and how much more work I’d have to do to be the kind of person that she was. [After she passed,] I started trying to learn about Coast Salish culture every way that I could. I was attending language classes, reading anthropological texts, talking to Elders in my community, and it really pushed me towards our art. As I was doing all this research, I realized, if you want to learn about who we are as Indigenous peoples, you have to go to our own forms of self expression, our art, and our stories. That’s been a really transformative thing in my life. It became a new way to talk about what I was learning and to tell stories about my own life and my own experience.

I think being interdisciplinary and approaching work from different angles has been very important for me. Being such a new artist, instead of being down on myself and feeling like I don't know how to do something, I try to think about a different way to approach it. My practice is really storytelling driven, and all of it is storytelling in its own way. Different ideas come to me; the process is figuring out what the best medium is for the project across digital art, painting, sculpture, installation, curation—all of it. It's trying to figure out what the story is and what the best way to tell that story is.

There are a few different kinds of lines that I like to follow. A big inspiration for me is the work of contemporary Indigenous poets and this idea of resisting definition in our work. Billy Ray Belcourt’s A History of My Brief Body was a book that I read in that early period of being an artist that helped me reimagine what Indigenous art is today and what different forms of expression look like. Jordan Abel’s book NISHGA was a major one that I grappled with in my thesis, and one of my most recent shows at the Nanaimo Art Gallery was in dialogue with his work. There’s so much expectation placed on us as Indigenous artists and storytellers of what our work should be and how it should look. So to kind of throw that out the window and just let it be about us using our voice and telling our stories.

[Artist & 221A Fellow,] Lauren Crazybull and I were studio mates. We met at Emily Carr and stayed in touch. She reached out to me and said, “Hey I know you're looking for a studio right now—I am too—and I found this space at Franklin, do you want to share?” And I said yes, absolutely. We shared the studio for about seven or eight months, and that was really awesome. Lauren is such an incredible artist. Just getting to watch her paint was amazing.

It's really powerful.

There are so many artists who I admire that have studios around here. I was actually moving stuff in and out of here when we had the winter market and I saw Gailan Ngan, who is a ceramicist. My dad actually apprenticed under her dad in the 90’s. Her work is just amazing, and her dad's work has been a huge influence on me. So I was really stoked to see her. I was like, “Oh my God, she's here?” I wish I’d had my studio prepared to show her.

I'm working on a series of murals for the Cancer Center in Surrey this summer. I'm getting the designs done right now. I am also working on curating a couple shows for next year. I was just in Chicago at The Field Museum working on a show that's going to bring together museum collection objects with contemporary Salish artists. I'm also going to be curating a show on Salish art here at the Bill Reid Gallery.

I’m always looking at the oldest instances of Salish art, you know? Especially with the work I do with museums. There are things that come from my community, the surrounding communities, and my relatives that I didn't even know existed. It'll be on a shelf somewhere, and such a beautiful and profound instance of expression that our ancestors made. So I am always learning from my ancestors and then bringing it forward, responding to it, engaging in a dialogue through my own practice, and bringing it to today.

They're pretty different hats—kind of like [using] a different narrative voice for storytelling. I really love being able to create a platform for artists in the community and recontextualize cultural belongings that have been totally decontextualized. When stuff is on the wall or in a case at a museum, you can't tell what it is when it's there. So being able to honour those belongings that come from my culture and speak to them as a xwulmuxw—a Coast Salish person—is really important to me. That’s really meaningful work that I can do.

For me, the work that my great grandma did and the way that she walked in her life was so inspiring in many different ways. So often I find myself wishing that I could ask her for guidance still, but then also being so grateful that she shared as much as she did. In my family, the artists are more present on my Nuu-Chah-Nulth side, but what my great grandma taught me was more about how we should live our life philosophically. I think that's just as important as thinking about material, practice, and process. And my mom Ilse Hill, who's non-Indigenous, raised me. She was the one who was making sure we were spending time with our grandparents. She's the biggest reader I've ever known and is always telling me to read things. She just devours theory books and all sorts of stuff. So I’m really grateful for the conversations that I have with her and the way that she raised me ‘cause it taught me the way to be.

I love anime. I watch a lot of anime. One of my favourites is Mushi-shi. That’s one that just resonates so much with me. There’s this dream that I have of doing an animated series about Northwest Coast mythology similar to the way that Mushi-shi is told, because it's this episodic narrative of the supernatural world that has a lot of philosophical and environmental stuff going on. That's definitely a show that I've watched a lot. I watch it to help me sleep.

That’s one of my dreams.

Totally. Thank you.