Kids and parents will get to go one-on-one with the creator of St. Albert Place's stone statues next week as part of an expanded aboriginal presence at the International Children's Festival.
Artist Stewart Steinhauer returns to St. Albert next week for his second round at the International Children's Festival. The Saddle Lake artist delivered five large granite sculptures to St. Albert Place as part of the kids' festival last year.
Steinhauer is part of a newly expanded aboriginal presence at the festival, says organizer Nancy Abrahamson, one that includes Cree dancers and an exhibit on Métis beadwork. "We already have those beautiful sculptures out there," she says, and teachers wanted more aboriginal activities for their students. "I think everybody's going to be interested, not just the children, in how those beautiful pieces were created."
Kids like rock
Steinhauer will be teaching kids and adults about aboriginal stonecutting throughout the festival. "Kids are incredibly creative," he says. "Give them a small collection of tools and a little bit of soft stone and they'll just immediately start carving."
Kids seem to be magnetically attracted to rock, Steinhauer notes. "They gotta go over and touch them and climb on them."
It doesn't have to be sculpted rock, either — his kids often have hours of fun clambering around the piles of stones he keeps in his yard for future projects.
Kids who visit Steinhauer won't have time to finish a carving, but will get to see how he makes them and get to handle sculpted pieces of soapstone and granite. "It's not me that's the attraction," he insists. "It's the rock."
The Cree believe that stones have their own spiritual identity, he explains, and contain the essence of what they are to become. The rock has a message within it and it's an artist's job to deliver it to the people.
"The rock always has so much input into what its final form will be."
New and old
Also new at the festival is Sharon Kootenay, a board member with the Aboriginal Arts Council of Alberta. She'll be demonstrating Inuit printmaking and will teach kids about Inuit legends as they make their own prints using foam cutouts.
Printmaking is a recent addition to Inuit culture, says Kootenay, dating back to about 1957. Canadian handicraft guilds introduced the Inuit to printmaking as a method of economic development after noticing their skills as carvers. Inuit artists became world-famous after these prints were featured on stamps in the 1970s. "Inuit printmaking introduced Canada's north to the world."
Printmaking is a lot like sculpting, Kootenay says, in that they both tell a story. Artists will carve a reverse image of their print into soapstone, which is traditionally used due to a lack of wood in the Arctic. Once the stone is polished, the artist wets it with ink and rubs the ink onto rice paper. The result is a sharp, crisp image that depicts legends or scenes from everyday life, often in vivid reds, blues and blacks.
Back for a seventh year is Ryan Arcand, a St. Albert resident and member of the Alexander First Nation. He'll be teaching kids how to make one of the most well known crafts of the First Nations — the friendship bracelet.
Friendship bracelets are simple loops adorned with four coloured beads, says Arcand, which are usually white, yellow, red and blue or black. As the name suggests, these bracelets were traditionally exchanged between friends and family members. The beads represent those close to you, as well as the four directions, the four seasons, the four times of day, the four races of humanity and the four sacred animals (the bear, the buffalo, the eagle and the whale).
The bracelet is a circle, Arcand notes, and represents the connections between all people on Earth. It's also a great way to show a connection between yourself and your child, he adds. "It shows that we're all one, we're all part of this world."
Also at the festival will be exhibits on Métis weaving, buffalo hunts, and aboriginal legends. Visit www.childfest.com for details.
