What They Took From Us | Sugar Coated

There is nothing quiet about this red. I worked it across the canvas beneath the figure’s outstretched arms, building a surface that feels torn, scraped, and unsettled. I wanted something your eye couldn’t just pass over.

What They Took From Us is one of 22 works in my upcoming exhibition, Sugar Coated, exploring the forced assimilation of Indigenous people and the distance between what we are told about our history and what we are willing to look at.

Assimilation can sound like such a tidy word. In this work, I am asking viewers to sit with what it means when belonging requires someone to surrender their language, their traditions, their family ties, or their sense of who they are. Who gets to decide which parts of a person are acceptable? And what happens to everything they are told to leave behind?

The red carries that weight for me. Its texture suggests wounds, disrupted ground, and marks that remain long after the act that made them. Above it, the figure’s arms stay open. I keep coming back to that gesture and the space it leaves for grief, questioning, and dignity.

I approach this work knowing these histories are not mine to speak for. My responsibility is to examine what I have inherited, including the stories made comfortable through omission, and to be honest about the questions they raise.

That is where Sugar Coated begins. With the pleasant surface. With the reassuring language. With our willingness to accept something because we have always been told it was good.

I want the work to hold your attention long enough for that comfort to become a question.

What, exactly, have we been sugar coating?