How is it we humans can live on Earth, such a generous garden, and be so blissfully unaware where we are?
Michael Nicoll Yaghulanaas floated that question and one more at a July 9 talk about his newly finished series of paintings, the Daalkaatlii Diaries.
The 27 paintings tell a Haida flood story with biblical echoes — a story in which Raven and a freshwater spring in Masset’s Delkatla Slough save the Haida people after a tsunami turns all the lakes and rivers salty. (The Haida name Daalkaatlii means “sandhill crane tidal waters”).
Told to Yaghulanaas by elders Moses Ingram and Henry Geddes, the story centres on ecological fragility and on a spring that Yaghulanaas grew up drinking from, and that hopes his descendants will drink from, too.
“We have big changes coming,” Yaghulanaas said, noting that the paintings refer to a past natural disaster in a present of climate change.
With titles such as “surge,” “froth,” “gaawgaaw” (“for there to be big waves”), and ts’aamaas (“drifting”), they illustrate the story in a much more abstract way than Yaghulanaas’ well-known series of Haida manga graphic novels: JAJ, Carpe Fin, War of the Blink, and Red.
Yaghulanaa said he started design work for the paintings three years ago, but they were painted in a 90-day marathon.
Each is painted on a canvas 1.5 metres high and a metre wide. To have enough space to paint them all, Yaghulanaa and his studio team borrowed a Vancouver school gym over spring break, setting the canvasses on huge work tables.
The Daalkaatlii Diaries will only be shown together once, at a private viewing in Vancouver, before they go on to exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto this September, and to Paris next year.
Another question Yaghulanaas raised at the Playhouse was why doesn’t he paint in a more traditional Haida way? And isn’t painting a silly thing to do at a time threatening climate and political collapse?
By way of an answer, he pointed to elements of Haida art in the Daalkaatlii paintings — the ovoid, the relationship of the masses, and what he prefers to call Haida “frameline.”
“It’s an undulating line that never stops,” he said. “It has no end and no beginning.”
Like a doorframe, he said, it invites you somewhere else. The Haida frameline invites you to think beyond narrow borders and about the wider world.
For a look at some of the paintings in the Daalaatlii Diaries series, visit Michael Nicoll Yahhulanaas’ page on Instagram. For updates, subscribe to the artist’s mailing list at mny.ca.