Artist Ange Loft’s professional superpower is making connections. Much of her art involves inviting people in, and then connecting them with challenging projects and ideas. As University College’s 2023-2024 Barker Fairley Distinguished Visitor in Canadian Studies, Loft is continuing her current work to connect the past with the present and future, working with the visual languages found in pre-contact archaeological artifacts like pottery shards, pipe stems, and pottery.
Q: How would you describe your work?
A: I’m a multi-disciplinary artist. I work mostly in theatre—not in Western theatre—but community theatre and community creation-style work. I work a lot through oral history these days and am hoping to do more sculpture and wearable work. I work creating large-scale images more than anything else. I tend to work with academics and historians and people who have bodies of research. And I try to think about processes that help them using theatre activities and creative movement activities.
Q: What drew you to becoming an artist? How did you get your start?
A: I grew up doing community theatre in Kahnawà:ke Mohawk Territory with Turtle Island Theatre Company. But I think it was really about wanting to start and finish something. Art is one of those things that gives you a kind of satisfaction when it’s done. As much as I love planning a project, I really love finishing. I spend a lot of time as a kind of stage manager, thinking about the whole of the work. And that’s led me outside of the theatre realm, because sometimes I feel a little limited by Western theatre structures. I like to work outside. I love to work with new people.
But I also really like to have a core group of people I’m familiar with. That’s been a really big part of my projects—constantly creating these cohorts of native creators that work across disciplines. They’ve led me to the idea that we are full of narratives and are full of stories. Some of them are silly, some of them are torturous. But we have to tell them and share them with each other. When working with complicated stories, you need to have something tangible to partner with it. So, a lot of the work that I’ve done before has used sculpture, wearables, large-scale puppets, costume work.
Q: What are you currently working on?
A: I’ve been working on ways to get to learn about where we are through talking with people and through co-creating with different groups of people. I like to make a lot of creative and emotional experiments happen by putting people together and giving them some content to engage with.
In Kahnawà:ke, there are a lot of oratory traditions, which just means people like to talk. And they really like to talk. I’ve always been really impressed with the way that oral tradition-type people’s memories work. I’ve been playing a lot of games that have developed over the years, thinking about the role of performers, because they are just really good at memorizing and embodying ideas. I’ve been working with performers in relation to history content, and lately, archeological research.
Starting in 2015, I was lead artist of the Talking Treaties history project with Jumblies Theatre, and I was working on treaties, Indigenous content, and looking at the iconography of our governance structures. And now I’m putting those pieces together with what would have been here pre-contact in roughly 1300.
I’ve been thinking a lot about familiarity with patterns found in artifacts that are in that region in Montreal. But then I realized that I could take the same forms that I’ve been playing with and apply them now to artifacts that are from Toronto. How do we get to remember, become familiar with, and become really fluent in some of those visual languages?
As people in Toronto, I’ve been asking why we aren’t familiar with what the local patterns are. We should know, and it has kind of irked me. Why don’t I know the patterns of my own territory? They should be so prominent and so familiar to us all.
Q: And what has been your answer so far? Why don’t you know? Why don’t we know?
A: There’s a gap between researchers and the public. There are research sets completed by archaeologists going back into the 1950s when they started documenting things properly, but they’re not easily accessible.
But we’re starting to see a push. In Kahnawà:ke, where I’m from, there’s an archeology unit at the Band Council that’s worked on accessing all of the digital print and rephotographing every one of the pottery pattern pieces.
I’m really interested in the focus of getting the patterns into a kind of digital form so we can look at them, share them, and engage with them. Back in the 1300s, we would have been able to see who people were based on the patterns that were on their bodies. We would have been able to know their familial relationships, which clan they were related to. We would have been able to look at the vessels they carried, the tattoos on their faces and on their bodies, the patterns that are on their clothes.
By bringing linguists into the picture, I’m making a kind of larger way to appreciate these patterns to see that they are connected, probably to not only aesthetics, but they have larger meaning. And that it’s actually, conceivably, a lost language.
Q: You posed the question earlier, “How do we remember?” Where do you start to remember something that has been lost?
A: There have been a few ways that I’ve been remembering: playing with rhythm, tone, playing with my familiarity to social songs, and sounds that I could connect up to the actual graphics themselves. I spend a lot of time digitally tracing the patterns to teach my hand how to do it. And then applying it to clay itself has been really, really interesting, because you start to see what lines come first. You have to carve out the lines you need to build off. To look back at these pottery patterns and see what the rationale of the artist would have been. Because we only have shards, there are some really interesting questions. How do we finish a pattern when we don’t know what the ends look like?
With my practice expanding, what’s interesting is it can go anywhere. I could carry these patterns into a landscape architecture project. I could carry them into a community pottery creation day. I could generate an experimental movement and sound piece. This is one of the first times that I haven’t had a clear outcome of what the research is going to turn into. Usually it’s always theatre-type outcomes. This time it’s wide open.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity. Matthew DiMera is a Toronto-based freelance writer, journalist, and editor whose work focuses on the intersections of race, media, and power.