BIG Doll | XWAT Naaniitus  

BIG Doll is an exhibition that shows the process of making and creating from the heart, not the head. This exhibition is both profoundly personal and collaborative, open to audiences of all ages to participate in the design of an artwork. Dion Fletcher is inviting us to reflect on how our education systems are limiting our creativity. Our minds, bodies, and hearts are not uniform; we bruise when forced into prescriptive learning models.  

The process of bead-working is an entirely small and intimate act. Dion Fletcher makes her beadwork BIG  so that audiences can understand how it’s made but also imagine the other worlds that this big beadwork exists in—illuminating the process of active learning so that others may join in.  

Beadworking and doll making are cultural practices meaningful to Indigenous teaching and learning, as Cathy Mattes calls them, a “cultural continuance,”¹where “beads helped produce and transmit knowledge.”² Throughout the exhibition and programming, the focus will be on making and remaking, along with learning and unlearning, in a colourful space. This exhibition is curated by Julie Rae Tucker, a Lunaaweewi from Munsee, Delaware First Nation, and of settler descent. For the past five years, Vanessa and Julie have been learning Huluniixsuwaakan, the language of the Lunaapeewi in the Munsee dialect.  

^{[1] Krasny, Elke, Sophie Lingg, Lena Fritsch, Birgit Bosold, and Vera Hofmann, eds. Radicalizing Care: Feminist and Queer Activism in Curating. Series of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna 26. London: Sternberg Press, 2021.Pg.135}

^{[2] Ibid.}