Amanda Lickers

According to Lickers, hide tanning constitutes a form of knowledge acquired through sustained, embodied engagement. While certain aspects of the process can be documented, the knowledge cannot be separated from the experience of doing it. The knowledge develops through mentorship, collective work, manual practice, and muscle memory. Such knowledge is not simply acquired through observation. It is attained through active participation, commitment, and relational engagement.

The installation’s curtains extend a gesture first developed by the artist during an earlier exhibition at the Centre for Canadian Architecture, where she draped a sculptural bust of a 19th-century rail Baron at the entrance of her exhibition with sheer red fabric. In this context, the curtains establish a physical threshold that viewers must move through. They symbolize the process of acquiring knowledge, navigating social and material barriers, and earning access to what is revealed on the other side. 

Lickers created two sets of embroidered curtains for this installation. The first set features sumac, a plant that has held significance throughout the artist’s life. Sumac serves as a medicinal resource with nutritional and ecological benefits, thriving in disturbed and changing environments. Its ability to grow in degraded soils serves as a metaphor of resilience and renewal. The plant’s rhizomatic root systems also offer an analogy for community, relationship, and belonging.

The second set of curtains depicts the temporary safety fencing commonly found around construction sites in urban environments. These curtains also function as a form of safeguarding and protection, establishing boundaries around knowledge that is not freely available.

These photographs were taken during the Buckskin Babes Urban Moose Hide Tanning Camps, located at Bâtiment 7, a community space in Montreal’s Point Saint Charles neighbourhood, where the collective is situated. They document parts of the process of working with animal materials, including washing porcupine quills and the remnants of materials scrapped off a tool used to process a moose.

For Haudenosaunee peoples, porcupine quills are among the earliest forms of embellishment and pattern work, later adapted to contemporary beadwork, and have long been used as a material for adornment and storytelling. Practices such as quillwork, tufting, sewing, and beading are integral to Indigenous artistic traditions, facilitating the transmission of knowledges and relationships carried across generations.

The fray in the second image consists of accumulated animal fibres, follicles, and fats produced during the moose hide tanning process. Instead of being discarded as waste, these materials are returned to the land, thereby contributing nutrients back to the environment. In this gesture, the work highlights principles of reciprocity, respect, relationality, and care.