Faye HeavyShield

Faye HeavyShield (born 1953) is a Kainai First Nations sculptor and installation artist.

She is known for her repetitive use of objects and writing to create large-scale, often minimal, site-specific installations.

HeavyShield, the third youngest out of 12 siblings, grew up on the North End of the Blood Reserve 148 in Alberta, where her father managed a ranch.

As a youth she attended Catholic school at St. Mary's Residential.

Growing up on the Reserve she spoke Blackfoot and English and spent quite a bit of time with her grandmother who told her oral history of the Kainai, or Blood people, who are part of the Blackfoot Confederacy.

In 1980 HeavyShield enrolled in the Alberta College of Art and Design and later obtained her Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Calgary in 1986.

Drawings and sculptures inspired by the wimples worn by the Grey Nuns appear in the mid-1990s with heart hoof horn as well as addresses of prayer in the installation piece now I lay me down, showing semi-abstract fonts placed on a wall reflecting Catholic rituals and prayers.

In the 1990s, HeavyShield was one of the forerunners in the Canadian feminist art movement.

Numerous works during the decade reflected on femininity and womanhood.

In 1993 she created sisters: a circle of six pairs of high heels with the toes pointed outward.

The installation, representing HeavyShield and her five sisters, symbolizes the strength of women.

now I lay me down was a part of her 1994 exhibit "Into the Garden of Angels" at The Power Plant in Toronto.

Utilizing shoes again in 1994's she: a room full of women she brings together twelve pairs of women's and girls' shoes spray painted matte black.

This piece is the first time that HeavyShield utilized her own words (eventually bringing her poetry into future work) with framed black and white panels over each pair of shoes, representing "everywoman".

Growing up in southern Alberta, HeavyShield lived near two rivers: the Oldman and the Belly.

Many of HeavyShield's works are site-specific, such as body of land, first created in 2002.

Hundreds of small paper conical tipi forms are placed sometimes solitary, in couples, or in groups, on a wall.

The forms are in shades of red, pink, purple and brown.

The colors are obtained from digital images of human skin, magnified, then printed on paper.

body of land seeks to show the permanence of environments, community, language, and history.

These works often display multiples, whether the forms in body of land, boats, small squares of cloth, or other delicate and often hand-created objects.

The creation of these pieces leads to repetitive tasks, such as dying clothing – this repetitive process is one that HeavySheilds finds meditative and exploratory.

Always a major source of inspiration, HeavyShield's life on the Blood reservation and Blackfoot ancestry flow constantly through her work.

In 2004 she created kuto'iis ("blood"), which consists of hundreds of small knotted balls of cloth attached to a wall, painted in red Ochre.

Similar to body of land in its chaotic placement of the knots, each knot signifies a blood clot.

The repetitive pattern and ritualized act of creating the knots have been described as a "re-collection of stories, the sounds of language and song, of home."

She used to play in the Oldman as a child with her siblings and in 2004 she began documenting the rivers with photographs, which she proceeded to create black and white photocopies of, titling it old man is a river.

"Through digital images, writing and drawing, my time spent with rivers – their influence on our bodies and our histories – has been recorded and re-played. And through travels, this engagement with the idea of place and its texture has come to be site-specific."

The piece, shaped like a diamond, consists of one-half encaustic images of prairie grass and one-half a large digital print collage featuring inscriptions of her thoughts.

In 2004 she created camouflage, an installation and performance piece that involved HeavyShield placing stones and twigs from the Oldman River, which feature photocopied images of the river and text from the Blackfoot dictionary on them, on the shore of the St. Croix River.

This work was displayed in 2005 at the Alberta Biennial.

In 2007 HeavyShield narrated and acted in "Legends of Kainai: Stories from the Blackfoot People of Southern Alberta" produced by the CBC.

"My art is a reflection of my environment and personal history as lived in the physical geography of southern Alberta with its prairie grass, river coulees, and wind and an upbringing in the Kainai community (with a childhood stint in the Catholic residential school system). The past, present and imagined make up the vocabulary used to realize my thoughts and ideas; responses and references to the body, land, language. – Faye HeavyShield"

Upon entering the Alberta College of Art she began to explore artistic styles finding herself drawn to working with her hands through sculpture and large-scale installations.

Creating these works gave her a feeling of immersion in the materials and concepts behind the pieces.

From 2007 to 2008 HeavyShield studied Blood beadwork in the collections of the Canadian Museum of Civilization, the Royal Ontario Museum and the Glenbow Museum.

Studying the museums classification systems of these objects, she noticed they were stored in rows of drawers or on shelves and often with only small catalog tags.

During this study she also thought about the people (mainly women) who created the objects, people whom she and her family are related to genetically and historically.

One piece that came from this study is hours (2007); a book, with no text, consisting of twelve bound pages of woven white seed beads.

HeavyShield's Catholic education and the importance of Christianity on the Blood Reserve continues to appear in her work.