New Fire Landscape (2024) by acclaimed Indigenous artist, Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun Lets’lo:tseltun, is generously on loan at the UBC Forest Sciences Centre. Michelle Koerner loaned the artwork in October 2024 and it will be housed at the Forest Sciences Centre atrium for 2 years.
New Fire Landscape is part of a series of works that comment on the calamitous impact of climate change and wildfires. The piece was prompted by the wildfire smoke of 2017, which engulfed the Northwest coast of Canada. With a forty-year career thus far, Yuxweluptun is an influential artist in Canada and an advocate for Indigenous rights. Yuxweluptun’s work focuses on the long-lasting effects of residential schools, the importance of land title to Indigenous communities and environmental degradation.
“It’s universal, but it’s also personal. It affects me, my health, and I’m asking how do we stop global warming. I’m not giving you some warm, lovely Group of 7 romantic colonial utopian capitalist wilderness, untouched. These paintings are history paintings, and when you look into these paintings, you are looking into a mirror. The environment, land title, being native in this country, it’s all there.” – Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun
Yuxweluptun is of Cowichan (Hul’q’umi’num Coast Salish) and Okanagan (Syilx) descent. He has participated in more than 24 notable exhibitions such as the Vancouver Art Gallery (1997, 2005, 2006, 2011, 2020), the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa (2013,2014), and the Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada (CIRNAC) Indigenous Art Collection (2021-2023). Moreover, Yuxweluptun’s art has previously been involved with the UBC community. An exhibition of his works from throughout his career, titled Unceded Territories, was held at the UBC Museum of Anthropology in 2016.
“Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun’s spectacular painting, New Fire Landscape, is an important reflection of the forests at this moment in human history. It captures the devastating effects of climate change on the Pacific Northwest as forests burn at an unprecedented rate. It was important to me to loan this painting to UBC Faculty of Forestry to offer it to the students and public, for pleasure, for research and to make visible its strong message about climate change from an Indigenous perspective. Additionally, the painting reinforces the work of the Centre for Wildfire Coexistence, by providing a visual language for the critical need for changes to fire and forest management practises across Canada.” – Michelle Koerner.
