Welcome to our community of images, creatures, metaphors, stories, and kin.

Kinship Flag Project is a gathering of images that honour and celebrate the multi-faceted mysterious gorgeous stupendous creative event called life on planet earth. The images come from many places: dreams, casual phrases, flashes of insight offered by a vision, poems, a conversation, a pattern of leaves on the ground, the song of a bird. Some images are asked for, and some are made at workshops by participants of all ages. Sometimes the animal asks, tapping hazel on the shoulder and saying, “excuse me please make an image of me.”

At workshops, hazel’s invitation to the participants is to make what they love. Is there an animal, plant, insect, symbol, practice, activity that you love?

Everything begins with lighting a candle and making a prayer.

hazel says, “When in the studio I become a conduit and I invite in the spirit of Bear, the ecosystems where Bear lives, what I know and what I don’t know about Bear.“

Metaphors help us explore the depths of being human and bring poetry to our lives.  When we say we are feeling connected like a bee to a flower or inspired like the sun peaking over the mountain,  others can have a better chance of understanding us.  Metaphors help us learn about our emotions, abstract concepts, ideas of connection, our relationship with ancestors, messages from animals, and our roles in community.

A metaphor that is used widely throughout Kinship Flag Project is the image of a canoe with creatures in it.

Our kinship is symbolized by the canoe filled with animals, ancestors, creatures, and humans paddling in the river of life together. Navigating rapids, eddies, and waterfalls. The canoe comes from hazel’s Anishinaabeg ancestry and from the influence of her mother’s mother, Elizabeth Reine Bell. This image of funny creatures in a canoe conjures laughter, feelings of connection, moments of levity, and the notion we are in this together.

This life is topsy turvy especially when you don’t have direct connection to the land of your ancestors or to their teachings and practices. Until recently they guided us.

At least this is what we have come to know here at Kinship Flag Project.

The consequences of colonialisation have led to an epidemic of people living without connection to land and traditional ways of being. This leads to depression, self-doubt, social isolation, fear-mongering, hate, separation, racism, and other community wounds.

Along her journey, hazel discovered she was thirsty for something she didn’t even know she was missing and that was the ancient technologies of her ancestors: sitting in circle, storytelling, smudging with sweetgrass or sage, passing a feather around the circle, offering tobacco, spending time with elders, sauna, and prayer.

hazel remembers what Kahontakwas, Diane Longboat, who is from the Mohawk Nation, Turtle Clan, a traditional teacher from Six Nations Grand River Territory, Canada, said to the European folks around her circle. “You can come to my fire and get strong and when you feel strong enough, you go to your ancestral homelands and learn about your roots and practices in those lands.”

Many of us have ancestors from several peoples and different lands, and some of us don’t know who our ancestors are. Nevertheless, whoever our ancestors are we can call on them. All we have to do is ask.

The soft wisp of a bird’s feathers, the perfection of wild roses, the repeating patterns of cedar fronds. We are surrounded by sacred geometry, patterns of divine design, and compositional genius. The world is alive and reflecting beauty at every turn.

Here at Kinship Flag Project we are forever inspired by nature.  Flora, fauna, water, rocks, bugs, and light is where it’s at.

When an image, like Dragonfly for instance, wants to come through, hazel will research dragonfly. She will sit and watch dragonflies, look at pictures and read about them.

She will light a candle and invite Dragonfly into the studio. Through trial and error, hazel has discovered this inviting in of the animal or symbol is the most easeful and efficient way to create.  The times when hazel forgets to say a prayer and invite in spirit, the creative process tends to be a little clunkier.  Which is not bad just longer and heavier.

When invited, what arrives are the elements of the image. The composition and the other creatures who are part of the dragonfly story, arrive. In the Dragonfly Mandala, others who showed up are Dragon, the five elements, lightning, elementals, small forest beings in the shape of tiny flowers, the monarch butterfly chrysalis, crystals, and bees. The multi-dimensional story of Dragonfly begins to weave itself through drawings and fine cuts in the paper.  Hazel says, I never know the full story that is embedded in the image. The people who hang the image in their homes or gardens contain parts of the story themselves.