Mary McIntyre

Two Rows

Two Rows explores longing for (re)connection and a desire to repair; calling to connect and calling to account. Sixteen eating implements, composed of natural and industrial materials gathered near Lake Ontario, the Wonscotonach (Don) River and the Cobechenonk (Humber) River, rest on pine planks and sawhorses set up before a cyanotype scrim. The work incorporates the traditions of metalsmithing that are the foundation of my creative practice, the carpentry skills taught by my father and grandfather, and explorations in cyanotype printing, an ideal medium for projecting the ambiguous, the unsettled position of the settler.Together, the elements of the installation explore my responsibilities as a setter in Treaty 13 territory. The eating implements explore how we provide or withhold care from one another; how we preserve or destroy relations between human and non-human worlds. However, even the spoons that are completely non-functional could be made to hold nourishment. We can repair our relations – but we must want to do so. The deliberately artificial, almost theatrical installation is a portal to the provisional spaces where treaties were negotiated between colonial and Indigenous nations. The laying of the table invokes another ritual as well: that of the shared meal. Here, bell hooks’ love ethic comes into play. The act of eating together, the decision to set down weapons and making space to talk and share food, is a form of sacred practice, of ceremony, that requires us to be present and to be put others’ needs ahead of our own.

“Two Rows asks what I owe in my relationships with the land, and with Indigenous and other people who live on these territories. As a settler living on territories still bound by the Guswentha (Two Row) and Dish With One Spoon treaties, I am integrating traditional skills of metalsmithing and carpentry with the subtextually complicated medium of cyanotype, proposing new relationships between the natural and the ‘made,’ relations that bind us in mutual care.”