Christine Howard Sandoval

Sketch – Ignition Patterns 1, 2023
Soot, bear grass, handmade paper
14 x 22 inches (35.56 x 55.88 cm)

Courtesy of the artist and parrasch heijnen, Los Angeles

Selected by  Rosario Güiraldes

Christine Howard Sandoval (b. 1975, Anaheim, California; member of the Chalon Nation) is an interdisciplinary artist who lives and works in the unceded territories of the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh, and Musqueam First Nations. She is an Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Praxis in the Audain Faculty of Art at Emily Carr University (Vancouver, BC).

Howard Sandoval’s practice challenges the boundaries of representation, access and habitation through drawing, video, and sculpture. To create the series of drawings titled Ignition Patterns Howard Sandoval embeds the stalks or seeds of Bear Grass, a material used in Native American basket weaving, into sheets of hand poured cotton pulp. The artist then selectively masks the paper and scorches it to create a pattern in soot loosely referencing directional plans for the controlled burn of wildland overgrowth. The paper, with its geometric latticework, assumes topographic dimensionality when draped over a frame, drawing upon the artist’s past work which have abstracted the typologies of Spanish colonial mission architecture. The soot and plant fibre materials of the Ignition Patterns call to mind the wildfires that have devastated California in recent years which have been driven by climate change and exacerbated by a disregard for Indigenous knowledge and the tradition of controlled burning.