Bonnie Devine erodes the colonial world, shaping the imaginings of a decolonial one. In the process of erosion, water and time sculpt the earth in soft and persistent ways. An artist’s observation, too, is an energetic shaping of their worlds. This is why I know that Devine has made art but has also made a world that I live in, one concerned with surfacing truths lost to colonisation, while honouring the trauma still moving through it.
Shorelines, where waters meet land, are interstitial sites of cultural exchange and intertwined histories in Devine’s series of eight vivid landscapes, Land in War (2024-2025). In them, the artist examines the experiences of veterans, including her father, who fought on distant shores in conflicts produced by colonial attempts to conquer territories.
In the monumental Battle for the Woodlands (2014), Devine restores a colonial map of Upper and Lower Canada that shows only Lakes Ontario and Erie, offering a fuller understanding of this waterscape. Devine depicts the Great Lakes in red oxide leaping off the surface, fugitives from the confines of being mapped.
In the works that examine her home, the Anishinaabe community of Genaabaajing Serpent River First Nation, she painstakingly unearths the impacts of uranium mining in the watershed of the radioactive Serpent River as in Stories from the Shield: Radiation and Radiance (1999).
—Tania Willard
