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Moon With Wolves

“Moon with Wolves”

In the spirit of spindle whorls, this circular Coast Salish design depicts two wolves inside the moon. Literally, through literacy, this image is expressed through written words as “tongue tail in perpetual pursuit.”This design is a piece of visual mediational literature, an attempt to mediate between the orality of traditional Coast Salish culture and the literacy of contemporary Canadian culture.Contemporary Haida artist Robert Davidson has ARTiculated his perspective that Haida art is a visual means for documenting Haida history, while contemporary Coast Salish artist Susan Point has compared Coast Salish deSIGN elements to letters of the alphabet (consider the cuneiforms of ancient Mesopotamia). With this in mind, it is SIGNificant in this deSIGN that the “tongue tail” is a visual pun which utilizes the poetic element of alliteration. Like literacy, Coast Salish art can also use puns. Like letters of the alphabet which are composed to create various sounds and words, Coast Salish deSIGN elements can also be composed to create various visual images.