Traces
Festival America — Vincennes, France
Festival America invited participating artists and writers to respond to Canada.
I arrived with plywood, sand, paint, brushes, and a question:
What is my relationship to this place?
For ten days and nights, Paris became a temporary studio. I painted, held workshops, shared conversation, and tried to make sense of experiences I had brought with me.
I was in France, thinking about home.
I had recently returned from Calgary, where I’d painted Mukta drawing her home in chalk. The work I was developing with Dawn was also opening a continuing relationship with the Banff Centre.
I arrived in France with more from those experiences than I had yet found words for.
Conversations around land, Indigenous identity, stewardship, and reconciliation – those encounters were changing how I understood my relationship to the country.
What did it mean to belong to a place? What responsibilities came with that relationship?
These were questions I carried into the studio.
I worked on circular plywood panels, building surfaces with sand, acrylic paint, and layers of texture.
Prairie sky, water, stone, weather, and distance found their way into the paintings, alongside memories that were harder to locate.
The panels gave me room to approach the subject in fragments. I could follow one thought without asking it to account for the whole country.
Working quickly, I left the surfaces rough. The materials remained visible, part of how each painting took shape.
The title stayed tentative.
Something About This Country.
It was as much as I felt able to say.
Looking back, I remember trying to understand my place within a landscape I knew intimately in some ways and barely understood in others.
For ten days in Vincennes, that question had somewhere to take form.
© Jason Botkin