Using thousands of metres of red string, this Métis artist is bringing a message of healing across Canada

Tracey-Mae Chambers always has her hands busy. When she's at home in Hamilton, Ont., the artist is forever untangling red thread, she says. "I never stop," laughs Chambers — and as her fingers work, so does her mind. Often she reflects on the memories she's made across Ontario this summer, in Brantford and Guelph and Niagara Falls: all the various towns and cities where she's unspooled thousands of metres of thread.

It's part of a project she calls Hope and Healing Canada, an endeavour that's taken her to 27 communities in the province as of writing. Chambers has been spinning installations out of string at these sites: some indoor, some outdoor, all accessible to the public. And her webs are usually improvised on the spot.

When they come down, the string is mailed back to her so it might be re-used in another town. But while the installations are up, they're an invitation to passersby: pause, reflect and consider what, exactly, all that thread is stitching together. 

The answer, she says, was going to be simple at first. As summer 2021 approached, Chambers felt like she might finally be shaking off the darkest days of the pandemic. "I think at the time I was feeling hopeful," she says, and her thoughts turned toward some kind of project with a COVID-19 bent: something to bring audiences a feeling of comfort and community after a long, socially distant lockdown.

But in late May, the remains of 215 children were found on the site of the Kamloops Indian Residential School. "It was a kick in the belly," says Chambers, who identifies as Métis. 

"You think you're able to finally sort of look forward, and then all of a sudden that happens and it just sets you back. Well, it set me back as far as feeling isolated. And separate. I guess that's probably a better way: separate from other communities."

At that point, Chambers was already in the planning stages of a new installation project. Connection and healing were going to be the themes. But reacting to the discovery out of Kamloops, her concept took on a new urgent focus. She needed to do something that would connect folks to the gravity of that news, and the impact of the residential school system — art that could be a bridge to Indigenous communities and perspectives right from where the viewer was standing. 

By early July, she was already in action, completing her first three installations around Hamilton before hitting the road later that month. Public artwork made the most sense, she says. Ontario galleries weren't open yet, due to pandemic restrictions — "but I could be outside!" And Chambers was hoping she'd get people talking on the street wherever she went.

The installation sites always carry some kind of relevance to the project, she explains. She's gone to Indigenous Friendship Centres and the grounds of former residential schools. Museums and art galleries are also common destinations. Institutions like those have traditionally overlooked or erased Indigenous perspectives, so just making art there is an act of decolonization, she explains. 

Many cultural centres have reached out to her directly since the project began, inviting her to bring Hope and Healing Canada to their venues. And one of those museums currently hosts the piece that Chambers considers to be the most powerful work of the series so far. 

At Black Creek Pioneer Village in North York, she asked for access to an 1860s schoolhouse. For years, visitors would have learned about Egerton Ryerson as a champion of public education while they poked around that room. Less of a talking point? His role in creating the residential school system. 

Entering the space this summer, Chambers was hit with emotion. "The chairs were so little," she says, and she was immediately reminded of her own children when they were that small. "All I was thinking was all these little people are not where they're supposed to be."

Creating on the spot, she knotted a loose canopy over the rows of child-sized desks. At the front of the room, physically cut off from the rest of the class with rough, dangling pieces of yarn emphasizing that break, she hung a tightly bound form in the place where a teacher might stand. Or "the colonizer," as Chambers explains.

"It sounds so corny, but it just felt like bringing the children back into the longhouse — back under protection and back to their home," she says. "That was the toughest one that I've done."

The artist is booked to keep working throughout Ontario this fall, but she will eventually expand the project throughout Canada. Due to COVID-19, her travel plans are TBD, but she says she's already locked locations "right from Nova Scotia to Vancouver." Each installation is being documented for a book she plans to release after her touring's over.

Until then, she is charting her progress through time-lapse videos and photographs that she updates on her website and Instagram. However people encounter one of her installations, she means to spread an optimistic view of the future.

"The title is hope and healing," says Chambers. "You can't have healing without being hopeful."

Find more info about Hope and Healing Canada, including a list of where installations will be appearing next, at www.tracey-mae.com.