Name/Title
LaundryEntry/Object ID
2025.05.01Description
Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill (b. 1979, Comox, BC, Canada) is a Cree and Métis artist whose practice explores the entangled histories of land, economy, and care through tactile, time-based processes.
Hill’s paintings are tactile, time-intensive works that blur the boundaries between image, object, and archive. Her process begins with coating paper in tobacco-infused Crisco oil, a ritual that requires weeks or months of drying. This oily substrate becomes a living surface—absorbing pigment, scent, and memory—before Hill layers it with wildflowers, beer can tabs, rabbit fur, press-on nails, and magazine cutouts.
These materials, often sourced from dollar stores or domestic spaces, evoke the undervalued labor of care and survival. Hill’s paintings are not merely visual; they are olfactory and haptic, perfumed with tobacco and berries, stitched with thread, and weighted with the residue of lived experience.
Recurring motifs—pantyhose, silk pajamas, compression socks—gesture toward feminized labor and reproductive cycles, while her use of blackberry ink and organic dyes connects her work to land-based knowledge and Indigenous economies. Each painting becomes a site of resistance, where the ephemeral and the tangible coalesce into a slow-burning critique of settler capitalism and its extractive logic.Artwork Details
Medium
Oil pigments, Crisco oil, paper cut outs on paperMade/Created
Artist
L'Hirondelle Hill, GabrielleDate made
2025