Issuu

FIRELINE KINSHIP TAYLOR BAPTISTE

MAY 29 - JULY 29, 2026

VERNON PUBLIC ART GALLERY

LIST OF WORKS

1. Flicker of Memory, 2025, ochre pigment pictographs, acrylic paint, plaster, pine needles, 18 x 82cm (right), 28 x 91cm (left).

2. Fireline Kinship, 2025, Nk’Mip, film (duration: 5:18min), Dancers: Jenna Bower and Gage Paul; Candance Gabriel’s Water Song, Singer: Aimee Baptiste; Firefighter: Wade Baptiste (Oliver Fire Department).

3. Wildfire Regalia I, 2023, used firefighter gear, pine needles, ochre pigment, sinew, 84 x 188cm.

4. One Who Puts Out the Light, 2025, used firefighter gear, eagle feather, abalone shell, sage smudge, kokum scarf, fabric, ribbon, 86 x 97cm.

5. Extinguisher, 2022, pine needles, sinew, 20 x 33cm.

6. Frames from Fireline Kinship, 2025, digital film stills, 40 x 61cm.

7. Fire Blanket, 2025, fabric, high visibility reflective tape, pinecones, hardware, 182 x 137cm.

Extinguisher, 2022. Pine needles, sinew, 20 x 33cm. Image courtesy of the artist.

FOREWORD

The Vernon Public Art Gallery is honoured to present Fireline Kinship, an exhibition by syilx artist Taylor Baptiste. Bringing this body of work back to the Okanagan feels especially meaningful, as the works emerge directly from the lands, communities, and lived experiences that continue to shape this region. We are deeply grateful to Taylor for trusting us with this important exhibition and for sharing such a personal and generous reflection on kinship, loss, and renewal.

Created in response to the 2021 Nk’Mip Creek wildfire, Fireline Kinship speaks to an experience that many throughout the Okanagan continue to carry collectively. Wildfire has become an increasingly present reality across the region, altering landscapes, disrupting communities, and reshaping relationships to land. Yet Baptiste’s work resists reducing fire to catastrophe alone. Instead, she approaches it through syilx ways of knowing that understand fire as part of a cycle of transformation, regeneration, and continued life.

Throughout the exhibition, Baptiste brings together materials tied both to the land and to systems of protection: pine needles, ochre, sinew, firefighter gear, woven forms, performance, and film. In these works, everyday materials and protective objects are transformed into gestures of care that carry both personal and collective significance.

As a gallery situated within the Okanagan, it is important for us to support artists whose practices are deeply connected to this place and whose work encourages meaningful dialogue around the realities facing our communities. Baptiste’s exhibition reminds us that contemporary art can act not only as a site of reflection, but also as a space for gathering, witnessing, and honouring relationships to land and to one another.

We extend our sincere thanks to Taylor Baptiste, her family and collaborators, and everyone who contributed to the realization of this exhibition. It is a privilege to share Fireline Kinship with our audiences here in Vernon and to welcome this vital work home to the Okanagan.

Victoria Verge Curator

Vernon Public Art Gallery

FIRELINE KINSHIP: STORIES OF RENEWAL AND RESILIENCE IN NK’MIP

Created in response to the 2021 Nk’Mip Wildfire, which swept through syilx territory and left behind both visible and invisible impacts, this fire moved through the places I call home. It touched the people I love and the land that holds our ancestors, traditional stories, and teachings. This body of work is about more than what was lost. It’s about what continues. And what comes out of it.

It honors the land that was affected, the people who protected it, and the teachings that remain. At its core, Fireline Kinship explores fire not only as destruction but as a force of renewal. In syilx ways of knowing, fire makes space for growth. It clears what has completed its life journey, honouring the natural cycle of renewal and transformation. It reminds us to pay attention, to return to land as relative, and to listen.

The regalia in this body of work are made from worn firefighter gear - materials that once protected people on the front lines of fire, including my older brother Wade, the only member of the Osoyoos Indian Band community currently on the Oliver Fire Department. Reworking this gear into regalia was my way of honouring him and others like him, who carry the responsibility of protecting land, community, and memory, seen and unseen.

Using materials from the land like pine needles, sinew, ochre, and pine cones - elements connected to fire, mending, renewal, and protection - I weave together stories of resilience and ceremony. These pieces embody the tension between destruction and healing. They turn heaviness into movement and ceremony, grief into kinship, and fire into a source of life and renewal.

The film Fireline Kinship breathes life into these regalia. I am deeply grateful to have had the opportunity to gather some of my family and extended community as vital parts of this work. My dear cousins, the dancers Jenna Bower and Gage Paul, move through the post-

fire landscape in the regalia, adorned with pine cones and pine needles from Nk’mip. Aimee Baptiste sings Candace Gabriel’s Water Song, a melody that flows with softness and strength, offering calm and connection. Together, these elements hold breath, memory, and care.

The large diptych sculpture, Flicker of Memory, shaped like a tall flame, is painted with acrylic paint and ochre. Ochre carries both cultural and spiritual significance for Okanagan people. On its surface, I painted pictographs that depict the Nk’Mip fire as it unfolded. These marks act as visual storytelling, recording moments and movements of the fire as it evolved.

The pictographs link the contemporary event of the wildfire to traditional ways of marking time, place, and experience. Through this connection, the sculpture holds the memory of the fire’s path, honouring its force while grounding the work in a traditional language that carries our people’s stories forward.

For Extinguisher, I wove a fire extinguisher using traditional Okanagan pine needle basketry methods. The piece reflects a contradiction: an object meant to put out fire made from one of the natural fuels that make our wildfires burn so fiercely. I wove it quickly, echoing the urgency and speed with which fire moves through our territories. Some Indigenous communities mark the passing of time after a loss with ceremonies - sometimes one year later, sometimes after four. For me, this work is that ceremony; a memorial created during the four years after the fire. It has been my way to grieve, to heal, and to keep walking forward. I hope it creates space for others to come together in love, in discussion, or to heal from fires that have affected them as well.

At its core, this body of work is about land, kinship, and ceremony - the ways we hold space for each other in uncertain times and how we return to the land to find healing. Fireline Kinship is a deeply

personal love letter to Nk’mip, the land that is woven into my very being, as it heals and regenerates. It is my offering of remembrance, gratitude, and honour for the relationships that endure beyond fire and loss.

At its heart, Fireline Kinship holds space for resilience and renewal - reminding us that from loss grows new life, and from grief blooms kinship. This exhibition is my offering: a place to gather, to remember, and to move forward together. Rooted in Indigenous ways of knowing, it is a call to walk gently with one another and the land through all seasons of change and growth.

limləmt

qʷəqʷcwíyaʔ Taylor Baptiste

One Who Puts Out the Light (detail), 2025.

Used firefighter gear, eagle feather, abalone shell, sage smudge, kokum scarf, fabric, ribbon, 86 x 97cm. Image courtesy of the artist.

Flicker of Memory, 2025.

Ochre pigment pictographs, acrylic paint, plaster, pine needles, 18 x 82cm (right), 28 x 91cm (left). Image courtesy of the artist.

BIOGRAPHY

Taylor Baptiste is an interdisciplinary artist from the Osoyoos Indian Band of the syilx Okanagan Nation. She draws upon her upbringing in Nk’mip - a field of sagebrush and wild roses nestled between the mountains and Osoyoos Lake on the Osoyoos Indian Band reservation. Raised by her parents Richard and Colleen Baptiste, her art practice is deeply rooted in her family, community and ancestral history. Moreover, she incorporates elements of syilx storytelling and epistemologies, reflecting a connection to the land and waters of the Okanagan.

Taylor sculpturally blends Okanagan land-based materials and syilx traditional practices with contemporary mediums and modes of making; working with materials ranging from ochre pigment, buckskin, rocks, beadwork, sinew and ready-made materials. While sculpture serves as her primary mode of expression, Taylor’s artistic repertoire also encompasses digital illustration, painting, photography, performance and most recently, film and projection.

In 2024, Taylor earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts: Visual Arts with a specialization in Sculpture from Emily Carr University of Art & Design. She has since returned home to Nk’mip, where she lives and works both as an artist and the Cultural Coordinator at the Nk’Mip Desert Cultural Centre. These roles are deeply interconnected. This reciprocal relationship allows her artistic practice to remain grounded in community and living knowledge, while her creative work continues to inform and expand her role in syilx-led spaces and futures.

One Who Puts Out the Light, 2025.

Used firefighter gear, eagle feather, abalone shell, sage smudge, kokum scarf, fabric, ribbon, 86 x 97cm. Image courtesy of the artist.

Used firefighter gear, pine needles,

Image courtesy of the artist.

Wildfire Regalia I, 2023.

ochre pigment, sinew, 84 x 188cm.

This publication was produced in conjunction with the exhibition: Fireline Kinship: Taylor Baptiste, May 29 - July 29, 2026

Editor: Victoria Verge

Production: Vernon Public Art Gallery

Layout and graphic design: Vernon Public Art Gallery

Front cover image: Wildfire Regalia I (detail), 2023. Used firefighter gear, pine needles, ochre pigment, sinew, 84 x 188cm. Image courtesy of the artist.

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted by the 1976 Copyright Act or in writing from the Vernon Public Art Gallery. Requests for permission to use these images should be addressed in writing to the Vernon Public Art Gallery, 3228 31st Avenue, Vernon BC, V1T 2H3, Canada.

Telephone: 250.545.3173 - website: www.vernonpublicartgallery.com

The Vernon Public Art Gallery is a registered not-for-profit society. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Greater Vernon Advisory Committee/RDNO, the Province of BC’s Gaming Policy and Enforcement Branch, British Columbia Arts Council, the Government of Canada, corporate donors, sponsors, general donations and memberships. Charitable Organization # 108113358RR