Since 2014, artist Courtney M. Leonard, a member of the Shinnecock Nation, has been exploring and unpacking the layered meanings of the word “breach.” She considers the word in the context of legality, Indigenous traditional knowledge and sovereignty, community connections to water, and whales. Investigating the idea of cultural survivance amid a changing landscape and environment, Leonard asks the question: “Can a culture sustain itself when it no longer has access to the material that fashions that culture?”
Hundreds of years of environmental extractive practices have contributed to a changing coastline and marine mammal health. In the face of this, how do coastal Indigenous communities adapt, thrive, and share their traditional ways of knowing? Who has access to the environment and what are the different relationships communities have not only with the physical world but with the animal world? Leonard combines ceramics, sculpture, film, and painting to create installations that address these questions and invites viewers to think about the changing coastline and environmental pollution.
In BREACH: Logbook 24 | SCRIMSHAW, she reflects on the collection of the New Bedford Whaling Museum in the context of her own personal and ancestral relationship to water, whales, and whaling. She places items from the collection—which include scrimshaw, logbooks, hunting tools, maps, and parts of whale bodies—in conversation with many of the elements indicative of her work: scrimshaw studies, ceramic vessels and teeth, and topographical contour forms.
This catalogue explores the exhibition installation at NBWM and Leonard’s ten-year journey in the BREACH project.
