Chloe L Wanaselja

Through my artistic practice, I document my journey towards belonging to land, giving an example of turning to one’s own roots to support a decolonial present and future. I am informed by Maausk, the contemporary Estonian tree-worship religion whose ancestors I descend from, along with my pursuit of supporting Indigenous land stewardship and rematriation in Northern California as a white person who deeply loves this land. I weave these experiences together to inform the rituals I create while interacting with trees, who are my main focal points in my communion with land. By sitting at the bases of trees, drawing their forms, or using their bark as my canvas, my work seeks to understand the opportunities for learning that they provide. Using my study of biology as another lens of inquiry, my work asks what it means to be sessile, to be unable to choose your surroundings, rooted with only the nourishment within our grasp. How would we find freedom in that existence, branching in every direction to follow what calls us, to create beauty in form, habitat, and nourishment for those around us? What are the ecological functions of an oak, what does it give and take from its relationships with other oaks and other species? What changes when a relationship is the unit of measurement of an ecosystem instead of a species or individual?
I seek to build a reciprocal relationship with these beings, using my art to find out how. In a time of ecological disaster, of dramatic structural inequality, I attempt to move away from capitalist systems of being, asking how we can see uncertainty and instability as creating space for radical liberatory futures. Inspired by the works of Andy Goldsworthy, Cannupa Hanska Luger, the biologist Suzanne Simard, and many more, I use oil, impasto, found pigments, bark, lichen, plant stalks, and detritus, understanding that my material has agency and is as much a teacher as a tool.