UHA is a partner site for the 2023 Bonavista Biennale. Visit bonavistabiennale.com to learn
more about the Biennale and all 20 sites across the Bonavista Peninsula!
At UHA, the featured artists are Shirley Moorhouse and Lindsay Katsitsakatste Delaronde.
Shirley Moorhouse was born in Happy Valley-Goose Bay, Nunatsiavut (Labrador), where
she currently lives. Her career spans almost three decades of innovative artistic production,
community advocacy, and service to organizations that support Inuit artists. Moorhouse’s
sculptures and wall hangings incorporate traditional methods and materials, such as
embroidery, beading, smoke-tanned hides, furs, wool, together with unconventional items such
as shells, plastic, wires, locks, pins, and electronics. Her wall hangings are meticulously
handstitched, with dynamic imagery that often appears dream-like or fantastical. Through this
unique visual language, Moorhouse explores themes of ecology, Inuit identity, spirituality, and
cultural continuity. She gently challenges viewers to be more aware of Labrador’s ever-changing
natural, social and geopolitical boundaries.
Lindsay Katsitsakatste Delaronde is Kanienke’haka from Kahnawake. Delaronde’s artistic
practice focuses on Indigenous theatre, land-based dramaturgy, eco-somatics, site-specific
performance art, and co-creative collaborative practice. Her new film Gemini: TEHNIKHEN
(Twins) is a film of a land-based ritual performance that expresses a perspective of the artist’s
birth natal chart and their relationship to the astrological sign of the twins. The study of a natal
chart creates a compass which can lead to a better understanding of emotions, relationships,
connections, actions, boundaries and abundance. Mapping the cosmology of a natal chart and
grounding in this celestial knowledge supports deep spiritual insights of human sovereign
nature. Delaronde’s sublime, laborious and cognizant performance collapses the physical,
spiritual and mental into emotional gestures and cathartic actions that bring together aspects of
land-based connections of belonging and responsible stewardship, enabling her body and soul
to become aligned to (a) place(s) of inheritance.
Gemini: TEHNIKHEN (Twins) is commissioned by MOMENTA Biennale de l’image.
MOMENTA and Bonavista Biennale have also partnered to co-commission Delaronde’s new
outdoor movement work, Sturgeon Woman Rising, which will be performed at 11 AM on Saturday, August 19, at Sandy Cove Beach, Elliston.