syilx Okanagan artist q???q??cw?íya? (Chipmunk) Taylor Baptiste stands on Jan. 10, 2024 at the University of B.C. Okanagan with her sculptures representing pictographs at the opening reception of her exhibit, "q?ayisxn: Off the Rocks".

Image Credit: Aaron Hemens, Local Journalism Initiative

It was the middle of the pandemic, and syilx Okanagan artist Chipmunk Taylor Baptiste found herself feeling homesick for her Osoyoos Indian Band community.

She had left to attend art school at Emily Carr University in Vancouver.

Baptiste thought about her family harvesting ochre — an iron-rich clay earth used as a pigment around the world for millennia — from her ancestral homelands. Community members taught her how to grind it down to mix it into a natural paint.

So to stay connected to her home, Baptiste got to work mixing ochre she had harvested from her land. 

“From there, I went through combining ochre pigment that I harvested and learned from them, with other materials to create my own paint,” Baptiste told IndigiNews, explaining how she mixed the powder with binders such as bear grease, fish oil, honey, and even saliva.

The experiments helped “build my relationship with the material,” she said.

After making her own paints this way, she said she began to try creating different paintings and pictographs on rocks and other canvases.

Now, nearly five years later, Baptiste is back in her homelands. She brought with her two pictograph sculptures that she created during her time in art school, which are inspired and informed by her syilx practices.

The two sculptures — How Turtle Set the Animal People Free and Flight of Union — make up the "q?ayisxn: Off the Rocks" exhibit this month at the University of British Columbia Okanagan’s art gallery in Kelowna (ki?láwna?). According to Baptiste, q?ayisxn in her nsyilxcen language is a type of pictograph not painted on rock.

The exhibit opened Jan. 9, celebrated with a reception the next day. It’s on display until Jan. 22. 

'Pictographs become their own living beings'

Ochre pigment has been a key ingredient used by generations of syilx Okanagan people to create pictograph mark-making on their territories. Pictograph paintings are found on rock surfaces, recording events and depicting everything from the nation’s creation stories to family lineages and to stories about the specific sites where they were painted.

“They were marks left by our ancestors on this land,” Baptiste said, a reminder of how long syilx people have lived on their territories.

There are pictograph sites across syilx Okanagan territory, dated from hundreds to thousands of years old. These sites are protected and their locations safeguarded, because settler-colonialism led to some historic sites being vandalized or even removed entirely.

That happened in 2020, when a pictograph site in Baptiste’s home community was vandalized with vulgar, racist remarks. 

“I remember the moment when I saw it on the news, while I was in Vancouver,” she said. “It felt like losing a loved one, seeing that happen.”

Fortunately, state-of-the-art laser technology was able to save and preserve the pictograph by removing the spray paint. 

The incident led Baptiste to begin researching the restoration technology; she learned that a layer of microorganisms can develop and live over the top of pictographs for hundreds of years. 

“They actually absorb the pigments themselves, so these tiny little microorganisms that live on the pictographs become pigmented and they’re moving around them,” she explained. “So these pictographs actually become living beings and living documents themselves.”

She dedicated a research paper to this natural phenomenon, and to the laser technology used to save her community’s pictograph. With her academic focus on sculpture, she created an art piece to accompany her research — honouring her culture in the process.

“I wanted to create a piece that could symbolize how pictographs become their own living beings,” she said. “So my thought process in doing that was to take it off of the wall, and to give it its own 3D space off of the rocks — something we could walk around and see.”

The result was a nearly three-metre-tall figure depicting a core story from the nation’s captik?l — syilx oral narratives — titled “How Turtle Set the Animal People Free.??”

Passed from generation to generation, captik?l are a collection stories and teachings about the syilx Nation’s laws, customs and values. They are stories that provide instruction on how to relate to and live on the land, according to the Okanagan Nation Alliance. 

Baptiste’s pictograph sculpture shows Turtle being carried into the air by Eagle, with the sun hanging over them. She uses leading lines to illustrate the movement of the animals.

“This is one of our core captik?l, and so integral to who we are as sqilx’w — as syilx Okanagan people,” she said. “I wanted to up the scale to make it larger than us, because it’s something that we look up to.”

The sculpture’s image is not of a pictograph that already exists. Baptiste created the image herself, inspired by studying different pictographs on her territories.  

To make it, she used her fingers to paint — like her ancestors had done — on paper hung on her art studio’s wall, using the ochre paint she mixed.

“I spend a lot of time at the pictograph sites,” she recalled. “I never make a one-to-one copy of a pictograph. I don’t believe that’s right.”

She then photographed her painting, and used her iPad to digitize the image, then created a 3D rendition of the image.

Shortly after, Baptiste followed a similar process to create a second original 3D pictograph sculpture, Flight Of Union. After watching two eagles mating above a river, Baptsite said she was inspired to preserve fast, fleeting but wondrous moments in nature. 

She spent three days hammering out sheet metal,  sculpting the curves that illustrate the eagle’s features. The nearly-two-metre high figure was then attached to a heavy-duty motor — the kind used to turn a disco ball — to keep the eagle constantly rotating. 

When illuminated, her creation projects its own shadow underneath that depicts two eagles mating, their talons locked together as they spiral down toward the earth.

“I wanted to immortalize it a bit … having the tension of it so close to the ground before they break apart,” she said of her concept behind the moving sculpture and its “shadow work.” 

Both sculptures are made of metal and foam, and use colours that are matched from ochre mixed paints that she had processed herself. Additional touch ups were done using spray paint. 

The pieces were created last winter and into the spring, before she graduated from the university in May. Flight of Union was her graduation show piece, and had been installed at the institution’s main opening area above the staircase. 

“I think taking a 2D pictograph and making it into a 3D form does give it its own breathing space,” she said. “To me, they do feel like they’re partly alive even though they’re made of metal and foam. 

“There’s so much life and culture that gets projected onto them, that they absorb it and become part of it as well.”

‘Important and integral to our culture’

Baptiste has since moved back home. And for the first time, her two sculptures have found a place outside the university’s walls — on her ancestral homelands through the q?ayisxn: Off the Rocks exhibit at UBCO.

Dozens of people attended the exhibit’s opening night on Jan. 10, including Youth and members from Baptiste’s home community of the Osoyoos Indian Band. Their support, she said, warmed her heart.

“It just made my heart so full to see the young people wanting to come out and see artwork,” she said.

“The fact that I can do something I love, and to be able to show kids in my own community, means everything to me.”

In the future, she wants to increase the visibility of syilx Okanagan art and culture in her territory by bringing her work to more public spaces. Not only would that representation boost the confidence of her people, she said, but it would also offer different syilx stories at specific popular sites, helping connect Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities through art. 

“I don’t want it just out in front of a building,” she explained. “I really envision it still being a part of the land — maybe it’s in a field with sagebrush around it.”

She described feeling a sense of vulnerability in sharing pictographs and their associated cultural stories. But at the same time, she said it’s important to educate non-Indigenous people in the region, to help inform them about what the markings are, and why it’s important to protect them if they ever came across one.

“When it comes to this series, the most important thing people take away is to respect pictographs,” she said, “especially when so many sites have been vandalized.”

After moving back home after school, she added, having her two sculptures on display on her ancestral territory is “just as much” a homecoming for them, as it was for herself.

“These symbols are so important and integral to our culture and who we are as Okanagan people,” she said. “For them to be back in their own homelands is just so special.”

— This story was originally published by IndigiNews.

News from © iNFOnews, 2025