Jude & Spider in Holy Dog (video still) video available @ www.vtape.org
Jude Norris is a Plains Cree/Anishnawbe/Metis Nation
multi-disciplinary First Nations artist.
Jude is known as Bebonke Brown or Pipon ᐱᐳᐣ (Pih-poun),
the Anishnawbe and Plains Cree words for Winter, respectively.
Though her strongest cultural affiliation is Plains Cree, she usually uses
Bebonkwe, publicly, to honor having received this name in an Anishawbe ceremony.
Jude’s home territory is in and around Amiskwaciwâskahikan (Edmonton), Alberta,
and she is a decendant of the Papaschase First Nation, which was
disbanded as part of the colonial development of the city of Edmonton.
She has been based in Brooklyn, New York, for close to 18 years,
and has also lived for extended periods in Vancouver, Toronto, Brighton and London (UK),
Poundmaker Cree Nation, Saskatchewan, and the Lower Similkameen Indian Band in Syilx territory in Central B.C.
Jude’s work focuses on relationship – to self, others, animal and plant relatives, earth, culture, community, territory, technology, the spirit world, time/timelessness and the ‘Great Mystery’ – and the placement of those relationships in contemporary situations.
Jude creates from the very particular vantage point of a First Nations woman living in post-modern Western society, within both urban and ‘bush’ environments. Her work often mirrors the curious and challenging balancing act involved in navigating the often deeply dispirit paradigms, histories and actualities of Native and Settler cultures and life that is common to Indigenous experience on colonized territories.
She expands these personal experiences into work that embodies Indigenous expression and vision, yet is broadly accessible and relevant. Jude’s work contains and employs reIndigenizing elements and acts in the transmutation of the seemingly irreperable or inherently incongruous into re/balance, harmony, uplift and lyricism, while simultaneously containing an underlying ucanny or unexpected character.
Educated in both Indigenous & Western creative traditions & genres, Jude works in a variety of media to create in 2 and 3D genres and combinations thereof, in a creative process that disregards Western compartmentalizing between them. She employs elements of ‘Native’ material, language, creative practice, and iconography with those of Western technology, art practice & theory, and language, creating dynamic & signature combinations of the traditional, the organic and the digital.
Created from the wahkohtowin perspective of connection and relation rather than separation, Jude takes an empathic approach her use of a variety of media. She employs the unique qualities of First Nations & new media technologies to continue Indigenous embrace of oral and visual storytelling and a prayerful approach to creation. Her work draws constantly from a foundation of ancient Indigenous perspective, while pushing the boundaries of Contemporary Western new-media practices.
Jude’s work is both strongly aesthetic and symbolic. She often combines sensual natural forms or objects with technically manufactured materials and/or media, focusing on and often juxtaposing their physical and metaphoric properties to create visual intrigue, cultural introspection and celebration, and ultimately, objects or environments imbued with innovation and ‘good medicine’.
Jude is a recipient of the prestigious Chalmer’s Arts Fellowship, and has received funding awards from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Toronto Arts Council, the First Nations Fund and the Foundation for Contemporary Art. Her work has been screened and exhibited internationally, and can be found in the collections of major museums on Turtle Island.
In recent years, Jude has refocussed on her original medium, painting, while continuing to incorporate longstanding, signature elements of her practice in this newer body of work.
She creates her painting-based work as Bebonkwe Brown.
Jude with gathering 7050 (into space) & gathering 4494 (minowin/recovery),
Brooklyn Public Library, 2024.
Jude in Lower Similkameen Indian Band territory, 2011.