Cheryl l'Hirondelle

Life

Cheryl was born in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Her family is from Passpasschasis, Alberta, and her mother lived at Kikino Metis settlement. L'Hirondelle moved to Calgary at a young age, where she attended St. Margaret's School. Her last name (l'Hirondelle) means swallow, a "migratory swift-flying songbird."

She spent a year at the Alberta College of Art from 1980-1981, and attended the University of Calgary. She graduated from the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto, Canada in 1990. In 2015 she graduated with her MDes in Inclusive Design, from OCAD University, receiving an OCAD University medal. She currently resides in Toronto.

Since the early 1980s, Cheryl has performed nationally and internationally. She has sung in a wide variety of styles ranging from punk rock to world music and choral ensembles. Her projects include performance art, storytelling, spoken word, audio art, site-specific installations, public art, interactive projects and new media. She has appeared in venues including artist-run galleries, festivals, First Nations bands and tribal councils, and the women's prison system. In 2001, she performed for Prince Charles and the Lieutenant Governor of Saskatchewan, Linda Haverstock at the Prince of Wales dinner in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Her audiences have also included the Governor General of Canada Michaëlle Jean.

Music

L'Hirondelle studied music as a child. She first became seriously involved in musical performance as the lead singer in Vile, an all-female punk band in Calgary. In the 1990s, in Toronto, she sang with Anishnawbe Quek an intertribal women's group. Around 1995, she formed the band Nikamok with Joseph Naytowhow. Nikamok released an album of the same name in 1999, and was nominated for the Prairie Music Awards.

L’Hirondelle was also part of the group M'Girl (pronounced ma-girl), an Aboriginal Women's Ensemble with Renae Morriseau and Sheila Maracle. Their first album, Fusion of Two Worlds, won the 2006 Canadian Aboriginal Music Award (CAMA) for Best Female Traditional Roots Album of the Year Award. In 2007, they won the Best Group Award.

Cheryl L’Hirondelle released her first solo EP, Giveaway, in 2009. musicologist Brian Wright Mcleod included it in the Encyclopedia of Native Music (2nd ed.) In 2015, she took the Best Folk/Acoustic Album for Wrapped in Daisies.

She has worked with singer/songwriter and producer Gregory Hoskins on an ongoing project with women in prisons, entitled Why the Caged Bird Sings In 2016, she was awarded an artistic residency at Queen's University by the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Arts. Her project is called “Not too few to forget: developing a public art memorial for Kingston’s Prison for Women.” In it,shes works with the Prison for Women project to connect with marginalized groups such as the Grandmother’s Council of Indigenous women.

Artwork

Cheryl's practice is cross disciplinary, with a performative focus. Her work has been described as blurring the boundaries between art and activism, between memory and forgetting, mind and body, artist and broader community.

The performance work Dearth (by means of the senses), was a collaboration with Mark Dicey at the Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Centre in Alberta in 1992. It worked to disconcert personal rituals and myths, as they perform using staging codes observed by young children who are playing at being adults (playing house) to enact family roles and tensions.

With the support of a Toronto Arts Council grant, l'Hirondelle composed four round dance songs from an urban Aboriginal perspective. This led to her consultancy and eventual co-storyteller in residence role, along with other projects with the Meadow Lake Tribal Council programming. L'Hirondelle received another Toronto Arts Council grant in 2015.

She and Andrew Lee were part of the First Nations / Second Nature exhibit at the Audain Gallery in Vancouver in 2012. Their work was a reflection on property law, once defined as “everything up to the sky and down to the center of the earth”. Organic materials were collected from a city block and organized in a display of plexiglass tubes.

She was a participating artist in the critically acclaimed exhibition Beat Nation, curated by Kathleen Ritter, inspired by a show which originated at grunt gallery by Tania Willard, expanded at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2012 and traveled across Canada.

New Media

In 2004, L’Hirondelle was one of two Aboriginal artists from Canada (with Candice Hopkins) to be invited to Dakar Biennale for Contemporary African Art in Dakar, Senegal. They were the first Canadian Aboriginal artists to present their work there.

L’Hirondelle received imagineNATIVE’s Best New Media award in 2005 and again in 2006, for projects including treatycard, 17:TELL and wêpinâsowina.

L’Hirondelle has incorporated traditional Aboriginal ideas of singing the landscape into existence in a number of her projects. Through current-day cities, she traces Indigenous trails, walking along traditional hunting paths, visiting ceremonial locations, and singing and recording. She has walked through Vancouver and Toronto. Her five-song Giveaway EP, produced with Gregory Hoskins, incorporates samples from the 2008 Vancouver version of her audio-mapping songwriting project. In 2009, Cheryl L’Hirondelle's "nikamon ohci ask" (vancouver songlines) project was recognized as an Honoree in the Net.Art category from the Webby Awards. She has been invited to visit Adelaide, Australia where she will sing Adelaide’s landscape with the Kaurna people.

Visual Art

L'Hirondelle's art has taken a variety of forms, including performance, public programming, storytelling and curation. In the mid-1980s, she worked as a program coordinator for the artist-run centres Second Story and Truck in Calgary, and has subsequently been involved in a number of arts consulting projects. She curated the exhibition Codetalkers of the digital divide (or why we didn't become "roadkill on the information superhighway") at A Space gallery in Toronto in 2009.

Exhibitions

L'Hirondelle was one of four artists in the exhibition Wild Fire on the Plains: Contemporary Saskatchewan Art held at the Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon, in 2003. She participated in the three-person exhibition Object Lessons, held March 24-April 15, 2006 at Paved Art + New Media, Saskatoon. In 2008, curator Richard William Hill featured L'Hirondelle's work in the exhibition The World Upside Down, held at the Walter Phillips Gallery and three other art museums. L'Hirondelle had a solo exhibition, êkâya-pâhkaci (don't freeze up) at Toronto Free Gallery in 2008.

Her work has been included in Caught in the Act: An Anthology of Performance Art by Canadian Women (2012) and Making a Noise: Aboriginal Perspectives on Art, Art History, Critical Writing and Community (2006).