How Many Ways?

Close-up of Genevieve Robertson and her handcrafted pigment. Photo: Seida Canoglu

Orienting to matter

By Einnear Laffan

In A Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction written in 1986, Ursula K. Le Guin speaks of a certain kind of story told and told again, the story of violence, a hero at its centre, “bashing, sticking, thrusting, killing.” Taking inspiration from what Elizabeth Fisher calls the Carrier Bag Theory of Evolution, which argues that the first cultural invention was as likely to be a container as a spear, Le Guin suggests we orient ourselves anew, to tell different stories from different angles in alternate manners. What do you place in your carrier bag?

The Ten Thieves Artist Collective acquired its name from some amalgam of the thieves of the bubonic plague, who doused themselves in essential oil and perfume concoctions to protect themselves against the Black Death as they stole from the bodies of the deceased, and a consciousness of our position in relation to the unceded Indigenous territories we reside on. Colonization is the condition of our presence.

The group was brought together by Deborah Thompson in the wake of her attendance at the Venice Biennale’s exhibition The Milk of Dreams, in 2022. This exhibition put a question mark on the head of humanism and pressure on the hierarchies inherent to it: mind over matter, man over nature, human over animal, certain humans over other humans. . . The list and the hangover from it induce exhaustion.

 

As guest curator for the Langham Cultural Centre, Thompson will curate the inaugural Ten Thieves Artist Collective exhibition, LOOT, that will run from March 6 to May 8, 2026, with a symposium hosted jointly by the Nelson Museum Archives & Gallery and the Langham over the weekend of March 13 to 15. The Ten Thieves are Susan Andrews Grace, Jim Holyoak, Hildur Jónasson, Eimear Laffan, Genevieve Robertson, Maggie Shirley, Marnie Temple, Deborah Thompson and Carol Wallace, with a seat kept for an invited guest.

The pieces in LOOT are created independently but informed by a collective conversation and shared reading that began in 2023. If the spear was in the hand of a singular hero, the contents of the carrier bag are distributed; there is no hierarchy.

Do water and sky have memory? Marnie Temple considers this in the context of the Middle Passage, the transatlantic slave trade. Critic and academic Christina Sharpe calls this working in the wake, with all the ramifications this holds, including keeping vigil for the dead and the ongoing reverberations of chattel slavery.

Jim Holyoak has his eye on scale, creating immersive, otherworldly installations, while in his studio you’ll find boxes of images of plankton, the carbon-absorbing organism invisible to the eye without an instrument, images produced by looking through a microscope.

Susan Andrews Grace writes on scrolls with rust, writing without semantic meaning as such, but which communicates by way of corrosion, the canvas holding traces of objects and oxygen. Grace writes against the left-to-right, top-to-bottom grain of English, its arrangement upended.

Maggie Shirley attunes to the hybridity of lichen, a composite of a fungus and an alga. Pairing old man’s beard from the Lower Columbia with beeswax from a hive in Glade, Shirley envisages the evolution of a symbiotic relationship, a model of cooperation that runs counter to privileged notions of heteronormative reproductivity.

 

Hildur Jónasson has worked with ideas of ice and plastic, from that which is diminishing to the non-biodegradable. A printmaker, Jónasson works here with Japanese paper, stitching gampi and mulberry papers together to form a large wall hanging with images of translucent inks.

Genevieve Robertson’s textured paintings are created with pigments she makes from materials found and gifted. Returning to the sites of forest fires at Lemon Creek and Duhamel Creek in the Kootenays over an extended period, her work moves contemporaneously with the altering terrain.

Carol Wallace thinks with rock, seeing it through the lens of a time scale most of us can’t conceive, Give or Take a Few Million Years being the title of a previous exhibition. Wallace’s hollowed-out rock forms of silk organza are delicate creations, stitched crossing-veins fracturing their translucency.

If the mantra of Marxism, or historical materialism, is “always historicize,” the mantra of new materialism might be this: don’t forget about thinginess. These artists orient us to lichen, rock, rust, cow parsnip, water, gelatin, charcoal, wire, plankton, sky, mulberry—an inexhaustive list. Artist Louise Bourgeois has explained her interest in durée, or duration, by way of how it crystallizes into shape or form. Matter and time don’t exist in separate spheres. Or to bring it home to the body, as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen puts it, “to lay a hand upon stone is to press against time in material form.”

Keynote speaker for the LOOT symposium is cultural theorist Astrida Neimanis, the Canada Research Chair in Feminist Environmental Humanities at the University of British Columbia. Neimanis also brings us to the body, to embodied ways of knowing. In Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology, she draws on lived experiences to advance the case that the human and other-than-human are “porous and enmeshed,” the categories “human” and “non-human” never as tidily bracketed as we have been conditioned to think.

Neimanis’s work thinks through grief, “how we are supposed to feel when everything is dying, but when some things persist.” She questions the normalized stance against anthropomorphism, that an unwitting consequence of the prohibition was to make it seem impossible to feel into other-than-human lives, making it harder to empathize with species dead and dying.

The symposium will also include artist talks, discussion panels, an ekphrastic poetry workshop and a winter walk with geologist and artist Carol Wallace to consider regional geology and the history of extraction written through it.

 

Whether thinginess is imbued with breath or chlorophyl or mineral or possibility, we may need to hone our sense of senses to perceive anew. Poet Amiri Baraka suggests we have an infinite number of senses, that capitalism and alienation have limited the number we are proffered, the usual five, or six if we are allowed to include proprioception. There is space left in the carrier bag.

 

 

 

Eimear Laffan is the author of [about]ness (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023) and a member of the Ten Thieves Artist Collective.