Bio
Vanessa Dion Fletcher graduated from York University in 2009 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Certificate in Indigenous Studies, since then she has continued to live and work in Toronto. Dion Fletcher is a multidisciplinary artist who focuses on printmaking and performance. Dion Fletcher’s work has been exhibited at The Art Gallery of Peterborough: Jiigbiing – At The Edge Where The Water and Land Meet and at Art Mûr in Montreal Quebec: A Stake in the Ground: Contemporary Native Art Manifestation. In Addition to her own art practice Dion Fletcher works with the T.D.S.B Aboriginal Artist collective on community arts projects and co-curated the exhibition Emnowaangosjig || Coming Out: The Shifting and Multiple Self. Her work is held in the Aboriginal Art Centre Collection.

Artist statement
My art practice is a process of investigating the influence of culture and politics on the relationship between our bodies and the land. I create art using composite media, primarily working in video, print media and performance. The different physical forms of my work provide a diverse theoretical language to draw on.

I focus on ideas of fluency and understanding in the context of my Potawatomi and
Lenape ancestry. My interests in communication come from my lack of access to my indigenous languages (Potawatomi and Lenape) and as a person living with a learning disability caused by issues with short-term memory. Having no direct access to my ancestral Aboriginal languages has inspired me to explore the notion of communication without words. Through my artwork I am undertaking a process of recording or archiving in a way that is outside of the inescapable colonialism associated with only being able to speak English. My performance and two-dimensional works exist in a tension between action and output, where the definition of art vs. documentation are blurred.