Slow Enough to Watch the Ptarmigan Eating Willow Buds on Tundra A conversation with Maureen Gruben
“Home, for much of the Arctic year, is a dazzling layer—equally harsh and fragile—that exists between stars and ice.” I wrote a version of this sentence last year for a text on Maureen Gruben’s then newly completed Aidainnaqduanni (2020), a documented sculptural installation on the frozen Beaufort Sea featuring polar bear rugs. The work, which is one of many we discuss below, offers a concise glimpse into a beautiful specificity of place. This is a perspective I’ve had the privilege of experiencing first-hand, having been welcomed to Maureen’s home in Tuktoyaktuk in the Inuvialuit Settlement Region of the western Arctic regularly since 2016 after meeting on a ferry crossing from Tsawwassen to W̱ SÁNEĆ. It has been by far the richest art-writing experience of my life to write not about someone, but with them, particularly over this long period of time. Much of Maureen’s practice is derived from attentiveness to the unpredictable encounters with diverse materials that occur throughout the course of her days. This disparate matter often becomes the physical basis of her works, in striking and uninhibited combinations. The result is a material intelligence that enriches theoretical discourses without becoming subsumed in them; that offers an embedded index of place while holding expansive potential for personal resonances. The following is a collaboratively edited text based on our conversations.
Kyra Kordoski: When thinking about your practice in relation to mapping, one of the first pieces that came (2019). The work traces an angiogram of your father’s heart onto tanned deer hide using a series of punched-out holes and embroidered knots, creating branching trails that evoke caribou migration patterns over the land. The original medical image you used is essentially a map of your father’s heart, which provides doctors with information that can help them save a life. But in , the angiogram’s pattern seems more to map what makes a life worth living.
