Drawing

These 62 small works (3223/1-62) comprise a collection of drawings in pencil, ink, pencil crayon, and felt pen made by the artist between the years 1968 and 2015. During that period the artist has identified himself by the following names: Ron Hamilton; Hupquatchew; Ki-ke-in; Kwayatsapalth; Chuuchkamalthnii; and Haa’yuups. The drawings are, for the most part, applied to the backs of bookmarks acquired from a range of bookshops; some are applied to other pieces of paper or cutouts from his earlier silkscreen prints. Many of the images represent killer whales, often in conjunction with accoutrements and symbols of Nuu-chah-nulth whaling. The juxtaposition of bookmark and representation of Nuu-chah-nulth himwits’a, or narrative, is a deliberate and meaningful placement of two distinct knowledge systems in relationship with one another. Ephemeral drawings like these were not created for the market; the artist has long made them for himself and sometimes as gifts for relatives and friends; they are a way of sharing his knowledge and experience about Nuu-chah-nulth ways of knowing, thinking about, and being in this world; they are expressive of what he calls kiitskiitsa: marks made with intention.

A pencil drawing on a bookmark. The front-side of the bookmark is hand-drawn. Depicted at the top is a float attached to a rope; one end of the rope is frayed while the other end of the rope, located in the bottom-centre of the bookmark, has a harpoon(?) attached. Below the float is a hook-shape with a small fin drawn on the right end; at the other end of the hook is a small human skull. To the right of the hook are two decorated fins; the left is shaded with pencil except for a small uncoloured oval towards the top; the right one is unshaded and is decorated with an oval and three tower-shapes. At the base of the two fins are two human skulls, the left skull is drawn upright and the right skull is inverted. A third wide fin(?), decorated with an oval, extends from the frontal bone of the inverted skull. In the bottom left section of the bookmark, a large human skull is drawn overtop of a shaded whale(?) head. The reverse-side of the bookmark is a vertically oriented, machine-printed image of a red-brown rabbit in a green plaid jacket holding a yellow pocket watch in one hand and an open book in the other. The phrase "SO MANY BOOKS" is printed in yellow at the top and "SO LITTLE TIME" at the very bottom of the bookmark.