As I enter the studio today to spend a day contemplating what is the energy that surrounds me that pulls me to my safe place, it is the colour yellow that calls me. The girl with the yellow crayon, descendant of the Boyar, Korchinski and Sanyshyn family trees watching the sunflower take on many new global rising symbolisms. I sat at the kitchen table once with my mom and designed the logo that represents the people of Ukraine that were interned in Canada in the first world war. My mom talking of the stories and how the shame permeated the house as my grandparents struggled with the past. My mother described the cold and unwelcoming fear that she said shadowed my grandfather. The worn papers revealed from trunks and opened to reveal lies and subtle whoring of cultures. Cultures used for infrastructure building, but crown washed human rights decaying the yellow and blue like crayons on a hot stove.
I will remember that day, the kitchen table, the place we go for love. Life and a worn battle table of emotions as all who sit at my table have been life warriors. I will remember my Baba’s hands making clothes, and my guido playing the violin. Their eyes emotional and weary. Battle scars bravely showing, but the yellow light of hope, faith and love always the salt we dusted our meat with. The knowing to be grateful for what was on the table, and now knowing why, is soul changing.
The medicine of life is in the nature we all have, and the old ways of honouring the earth. The sunflower and not the monsters egos that want more than their share of the meat in the soup and destroying the table that can sustain us all.
Why did the flowers talk to me? Was it through the warrior women of my past. Are the sunflowers talking to me and asking me to bring the yellow forward.
For over ten years I have spoken for the yellow, the light and the whispers of the giant winged flowers, watching them protect my house and then watching them lead the globe. I will forever be a sunflower, and to know I saw will forever humble me and watch my grandchildren warriors spread hope and love and light as their green shoots search for a better golden age. I was born 100 years after the great man Taras Shevchenko…and in the great new family may we all be sunflowers.
ARTIST MICHELLE LOUGHERY 