This piece was inspired by a handful of sketches left to me by my great grandmother, the artist of my family before me. She drew from publications of Barbeau and authors who regarded our art in general as primitive. My gravitation to Nuu-chah-nulth style work and West Coast called Nootka would have been a very interesting place to explore. A design language is a story of its own.

As for myself, to witness in my lifetime a purity of lines and passage, the way my grandmother had written words, filled with commas. Stonington as a house of place I have felt sheltered by, seeing who has gone before me. I share a glimpse of what my great-grandmother was capable of. The alignment of my teachers shaped me into a keeper of many influences and language not spoken from my mouth, but the decided hands of place where my hands find paper and paint.

I didn’t understand the books saved for me until I went away to Japan, and longed for a place to find myself, at times looking back to a mountain, killer whales, and kelp. A place where nothing is erased from my mind and no song can be distance, like keys of a piano, a world that can’t be erased. To come home and know some heroes have fallen like many before… nothing like losing a mentor. Peering over my side at a window, I look at mount Fuji and think of the Shirakawa, the place I was trusted to be a dignitary for our people.

Greeted home from a world I wanted to be all my life, and I know that work is work. My great-grandmother gave me passage to push and pull myself thru time. Looking to all erased. Arrival home where all that mattered was to see our mountain and the love it holds for us–water and time.

This print will be maybe only one of its kind to be linked to its song of inspiration, 12 Ghosts II by NIN.

A lifetime pulled thru me like thread to be my name.

~ Qwalsius-Shaun Peterson