Kale'a Calica-Younker

A Flower does not talk

I am concentrating in jewelry and metalsmithing and through my work I would like to understand the cultural collision between Indigenous art practice and Western art. My practice is guided by Indigenous values such as materiality and process. Material understanding to guide our relationship with the world and process as a portal to understand oneself and one’s worldview.

My practice is directed by my drawing practice. I draw to connect with my landscape. Drawing drives me to understand and reinforce my relationship to the natural world and my surroundings. I draw to understand the relationships between what I see and my understanding of what my surroundings. I understand my drawing practice as an intersection of interpretation and observation. Through the material, I want to investigate the possibilities of drawing through material understanding. I am interested in disrupting what we understand and what we see through ambiguity and abstraction in my drawing practice. Disrupting familiar floral shapes and cage forms to merge my Indigenous worldview with the settler-colonial world. With the intersection of organic forms with rigid structures, I want to confuse and uncomfortably marry Indigenous futurisms and traditions with Contemporary Western art perspectives. My work explores how I understand both Indigenous and a settler-colonial spaces. My work also investigates how do I navigate existing in the periphery and how do I bring focus to what exists only in the periphery. Through my investigation of drawing, I want to understand the gaps between how we see and how we understand what we see.

Drawing is a form of interpretation and observation. Presenting me with a framework to direct moving through composition, form to line, to investigate how image shifts through translation from the drawing to making process. I understand drawing as a way of tracing actions and observations to reveal my layered perspective.