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Rebecca Belmore was born in 1960 in Upsala, Ontario, which is primarily a First Nations community. She identifies herself as an ascendant of the Ojibwa (or Anishnabe), and has so as an artist. Belmore’s cultural heritage is reflected throughout her work and as a Native female artist she is also concerned with, and interested in issues that address the marginalization of Native peoples and land.
Having graduated from the Ontario College of Art, she has exhibited internationally for over the past 20 years, and is best known for her installation and performance pieces. Important to Belmore is her site-specific art works as well as her performance art – using particular land sites and as well as her own body to represent her thoughts and ideas are integral to the messages in which she transmits throughout her work. Common elements that are found among her work
are her beliefs in the critical importance of Native attachment to the land, and her inclusion of other peoples voices, as a means of using the common human experience as a link to the past, and thus present. She should probably be classified as a ‘Primal Native Contemporary’ artist, as she uses ‘new’ materials (not native) like plastics, in which she is no longer bound by the Native context of ‘traditional’ art or craft. She is self-expressive and uses a variety of materials (natural and synthetic) in which she has been influenced by Native and non-Native subject matter.
In regards to the themes of memory, territory and identity, Belmore fully explores them because of her preoccupation with a larger theme – ‘getting back the land’. As a young person growing up in a degraded Native community, Belmore was subjected to much of the same treatment of forced assimilation and acculturations as many in her generation were, to the point she and her Oji-Cree grandmother became virtual strangers, unable to communicate in the same language (Young). Born to a grandmother who spoke only in the Ojibwa language, Belmore continues to create dialogue between her and her art – expressing the ways in which language has become a barrier in a land so driven by ‘english’ authority. Encircled throughout this ‘barrier’ secondary themes have emerged: storytelling, nature and woman.
Since displaying her art in the late 1980’s, Rebecca Belmore continues to make present her statement on the topic of Native peoples and the environmental issues that have arisen with the past forces of colonialism. She also makes clear how colonial attitudes which occurred in the past are not quite gone, as Native peoples are still victim to hate, prejudice and violence – especially towards women – and represents how the land, which signifies Native identity, has disappeared to destructive effects of modernization.
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