Chris Dufour

It’s been a while of not making much while tethering between different forms of love. Unable to sit in the studio and sewing machine over the last 6 months, I made my sweetheart a quilt that has my bloody little finger marks all over it from densely hand quilting it. Dyed with woad seed, indigo, and black tea. Interspersed are moments with this freaky little hunky guy.

Just some sweet moments of people, dogs, plants, crafts, and creatures that I hold dear over the months to share 🌞

Just finished this new quilt Solidago spreads in the interstice, similar to that of fireweed, blows its late fall fluff over barren and unearthed landscapes, ditches, lakesides, and nearly every other corner it can touch. This quilt spans many places from cut blocks on Sinixt territory to lakesides in Unama’ki to the train tracks in Tiohtià:ke. A tethering, an index drawn across place and erupting in this patchwork of yellow.

Pisces season and dreams of fishing🐟 *sold out* I’ve been wanting to make a series of prints based off of fish skins and I now have a small run of these shirts available for purchase. They’re $40 (plus shipping if I’m mailing one to you) and I have a selection of small, medium, or large. I’ll be doing another run of them in the next couple weeks based on pre orders, so if you’d like one and I’m all sold out, let me know via DM and your size (can do s - 4XL, I’m wearing a medium here) and I’ll get one made for you. These are all hand printed and from drawings, photos, and tanned fish skins. eventually I’ll have some misprints at discount because I’m clumsy. Send me a DM if you’d like one and your size and if you have any comments on your favourite fish I’d love to hear them too 🐟 This song from @oracogan has also been my winter theme thinking through animals and fish.

Photos from my residency with @limprimerie.art taken by @konioukhova of researching materials connected to hunting and fishing. I’ve been hunting and fishing for the last 3 years across many territories and within different relationships and have been trying to figure out how to share those experiences, stories, and connections with care and reverence. Without aiming for perfection, I’ve been learning to tan leather and make parchment, make various inks, cook and butcher, eat, and have now been learning to combine some of those through experimental print, photo etching, and naturally dyed camo sheets. A presentation of the research is going to happen later in March TBD 🦌 I’ve also been reading on hunting, focusing on political ecology, hunting in anthropology, and how others share their experiences and practices. In Hunting: A cultural history Jan Dizard and Mary Zeus’s Strang write on the transition from forager and hunter societies to domestication and the emergence of the nation state. Hunting practices became a state imposed elite sport through the onset of privatization, industrialization, and the fall of the commons and its access is still entwined with class and colonialism; NRA and gun rights started as a hunting safety training that got taken over by right-winged extremists; laws and programs which promote unfettered hunting (wolves and deer) to protect agricultural business. What brought me to this research was fumbling with learning these practices while aware that settler hunting is wrought with domination, racism, hetero-patriarchy, and diminishing (and in some cases eradicating) indigenous food sources. You see this in the dominant voices of hunting magazines, books, and media over and over again. There’s lots of levels to this and it feels sticky yet personally important, and this is really just a beginning thought as I grind bone to dust, transform skin to textile, and impress leaves into cloth. There is grief, wonder, excitement, and core relationships that underpin this. Last three photos of little process snippets from me 🐑 if anyone has books, artists, thoughts on any of this I’m craving connecting with more folks

Documents of a haphazard travelling somewhat urban tannery. In between the winter solitude has been getting to gather with friends around working with hides and learning new techniques of raw hide parchment paper. Forever in love with fire and flesh and death/transformation and textiles.

A year of quilting, stitching, dragging these fabrics across the continent twice and this sumac gem is finished. A friend told me of sumac being winters lipstick this week and I added it to my reason to love it. This quilt was/is a beginning of a body of work in the ways that dyeing, textiles, and (post)industrial ecologies can intertwine. The sumac berries in this quilt were mordant printed from photos taken of the berries and developed with the berries—a result of a nerdy obsession with material, process, and research. Lots of the fabric is dyed with sumac and goldenrod all harvested along the train tracks over a year ago in Tiohtià:ke. And other bits were mystery dye gifts from @kingrat_ Thanks to my sweetie @33.333riz for freezing their little fingers off and helping me photograph this 🌸 and for their adept photography skills and always capturing my good side.

No Monetary Value Passing of Pigments Weed Poetics Forthcoming residency catalogue en route to @oxygen.art.centre from my time there this past summer. The publication features a series of 15 poems from a dear friend and a writer Alana Friend Lettner, cyanoprints toned with goldenrod, dogwood, and sumac, wildfire and ochre ink screen prints, and a series of journal writings that I kept while working with cut blocks and industrial ecologies over the last year. Half of the poems I printed by hand using a letterpress and experimented with ochre ink from a cut block on Cheslatta territory and goldenrod ink harvested on Kanien’kehà:ka territory. The project was a labour of love spelling each poem letter by letter backwards and upside down. Alana’s poems and collaboration were such generous gifts to accompany the writings and images and for making words from textiles. TBD on how to get one at Oxygen 🌸

Been spending time walking, digging my hands into the earth, soaking crushed rock in silver, picking sumac, and reading while @vuphoto (alongside facilitating some workshops and more to come). Here’s a few snippets of the material research in progress with sumac developer and soil photos as I’ve been thinking through traces, phenols, and political geography/ecology. Kathryn Yusoff’s A Billion Black Anthropocene’s or None (I recommend!) has been with me as I walk by inaccessible rivers and parks with military remnants and continue to reflect on material collaboration and what gets tethered through metal and phenols. Tomorrow, I’ll be sharing a little bit of research if you’re in Quebec City and want to come; or if you know how to read soil chromatographs and want to get nerdy with me, let me know I’d love to know how to read these maps/photos that the soil and rock make.

Coming back and holding on to familiar textures, places, traditions, creatures over these last few months

Sharing some last little bits from the research on cutblocks, industrial ecologies, and material practices. I’m landing back mi’kmagi and encountering the same goldenrod, fireweed, and pearly everlastings just starting their bloom gives lots to reflect on. A big thanks to everyone @oxygen.art.centre and to everyone who came to join me in the studio, for workshops, and those who came to the artist talk this past weekend. Many of these photos were taken on a block and burn outside Nelson and developed with fireweed harvested from the site. I’m excited to continue with this research while on the eastern coast 🖤🌸

Wildfire Ink glistening from the burnt tree oils. This weekend my studio @oxygen.art.centre will be open for the Kootenay Cultural Tour and this wildfire ink will be available in exchange for a donation to local communities impacted by the wildfires in the region (links and resources will be available on site). The ink comes from charcoal collected up north in and around the North Lucas Lake wildfire that burned in 2023 and spanned 34 853 hectares on Cheslatta Territory. This fire is one I’ve come to know more intimately working on the fires in 2023 and replanting some of the incinerated blocks this past May. As I’m working on material research connected to the cutblock, the presence of several wildfires burning and impacting communities and friends can’t be separated. Playing with an infrared camera, the cutblocks registers as the hottest spots in the landscape. Wildfires, extraction, colonialism, and forestry are deeply intertwined. A favourite resource on this is the Future Ecologies podcast series on wildfires which highlights indigenous practices of controlled burning (and the ways empire has eliminated the practice, leading in part to the massive fires spreading now) and the political and ecological landscapes of wildfires.