Pine Grove inmates power Cheryl L’Hirondelle’s art
Art | Gregory Beatty
Cheryl L’Hirondelle: Why the Caged Bird Sings
Dunlop Art Gallery
Until Sept. 6
Dunlop Gallery: Sherwood Branch Until Oct. 25.
The undeniably poetic title of this two-gallery exhibition by Governor General Award-winning Métis artist Cheryl L’Hirondelle has a literal dimension, too.
That’s because the people who inspired her in her artmaking literally were caged.
It all started with a workshop L’Hirondelle did with Common Weal Community Arts in 2008, she recalled in an opening night conversation with Common Weal north director Judy McNaughton at the Dunlop Gallery in mid-July.
Common Weal partners with community groups to do different types of arts outreach. It has a south office in Regina and a north office in Prince Albert.
“I was working with Common Weal on the Dewdney Avenue Project in Regina, and it made sense to have me go to P.A. to do a five-day workshop with a group of women at Pine Grove Correctional Centre,” says L’Hirondelle.
It was there that the caged birds first began to sing.
“Instead of me going in and teaching the women some songs, I said ‘Why don’t we write a song together and record it?’” says L’Hirondelle.
“I was taught from a young age, if you have a gift you have to share it. I know how to write a song, and I know how important that was for me. If I could share even a bit of that with these women, they would have the same feeling,” she says.
Hard Time
When a person enters prison, L’Hirondelle explained at the opening, they get assessed in four areas: literacy, skills, cognitive and behavioural issues, and addictions. With the Pine Grove workshop, she says, literacy therapist Carla Johnson was a big help.
“Carla had the women writing affirmations in a journal, so we started working with that. All the women, as co-writers, would give me ideas and I would say ‘That’s a good idea. Let’s do that’” says L’Hirondelle.
The song “The Beauty Within”was the result.
“There is this notion of metaphor in Cree language,” says L’Hirondelle. “With ‘The Beauty Within’, the metaphor is that the women are the beauty within, both because they are inside the institution, but they also have their own inner beauty.”
At one point, L’Hirondelle invited McNaughton in to hear the women sing, McNaughton recalled at the opening night chat. “When I walked in, there was a group of women sitting in a circle. They were all slouched down and looking pretty tired. Cheryl said, ‘Okay, we’re going to sing.’ And they all sat up and suddenly had an entirely different energy. They took a deep breath, and sang powerfully.”
The Pine Grove workshop was originally intended to be a one-off, says McNaughton. “But when Cheryl came in, there was an intense magic that happened. It was clear that there was more to be done, and that the path needed to find its own way, which it did.”
Common Weal had a budding relationship with Pine Grove at the time, says McNaughton, having done an earlier workshop with Métis poet/writer Maria Campbell.
“It’s not easy to build trust with a correctional facility. It was a slow progression. But we built that relationship, and then word got out to the other correctional facilities in Prince Albert.” says McNaughton.
“Staff move a lot between facilities too, so when we went to the men’s correctional centre, there was a manager who had grilled me at Pine Grove,” says McNaughton. “She opened the door and said, ‘Give these people what they want.’ So we were able to get help from staff.”
“Word spread in the prison network that there was this woman who wrote songs and she seemed to follow all the rules,” says L’Hirondelle.
“The key thing is to build trust with the warden and staff,” she says. “Get really good at asking what the rules are for that particular facility, and then living by them when you are there. If you do that, they will love you, and you will have a good time.”
Freedom Song
As L’Hirondelle’s repertoire of co-written and recorded songs grew (she now has nine, including contributions from the P.A. youth facility and Okimaw Ohci Healing Lodge near Maple Creek) colleagues in the arts began to press her on whether she was making any art in response.
L’Hirondelle did more than that. She made the songs and workshops the centrepiece of her master’s degree in inclusive design.
McNaughton had been thinking along similar lines, she said at the opening.
“There came a point where it was clear something was happening inside the facilities. We talked about making that visible to people who weren’t familiar with life in those places. That’s where it moved from writing and recording songs toward a full exhibition.”
Two virtual reality pieces — “Mother Nature’s Powers: To All Our Nations” and “Medicine Kitchen Table”— are part of the main Dunlop show. Both reference the northern bush country where many of L’Hirondelle’s collaborators had roots. Other references to Indigenous culture and history include two tanned/smoked elk hides, and video of a drum circle taken from beneath the drum.
Another new media piece, “Here I Am (Bless My Mouth)”, has 10 iPad-style “vid-phones” installed along a corner wall. Each screen shows a woman sitting at a payphone. Faces are obscured to protect privacy, but if you pick up the receiver you can hear the woman singing snippets of the song they co-wrote with L’Hirondelle.
The spartan conditions the women sit in are a sombre reminder of the isolation and confinement they endure — to the extent of having to rely on a payphone to keep in touch with family and friends on the outside.
Nonetheless, a spirit of resilience infuses the exhibition — which is consistent with the workshops themselves, says L’Hirondelle.
“The first thing I’d say to each group after I introduced myself is, ‘You know that joke?’” she says.
“They’d go, ‘What joke?’ ‘That country song joke, what do you get when you play a country song backwards?’ ‘You get your dog back, your house back, your car, your spouse.’ We could write a hurtin’ song. But instead of doing that, why don’t we write a freedom song, a powerful song, a song of who we are,” says L’Hirondelle. ■
