Kerri Flannigan is an interdisciplinary artist and educator currently based on Lkwungen and W̱SÁNEĆ Territories (Victoria, BC), who experiments with methods of research and storytelling through installation, video, and performance. Flannigan’s practice has focused on experimental narrative and documentary formats that are rooted in wider social, cultural, and political contexts. This work frequently takes a collaborative form, working individually and collectively to create responses to ubiquitous themes. Family mythologies, coming-of-age confessions, queer experiences of place, fire, and swimming have all been subjects of recent works. Flannigan has shown locally and internationally, receiving funding from the Canada Council for the Arts in 2023, and the BC Arts Council in 2022, and was an inaugural OUTstages resident in 2020/2021. Flannigan is currently developing two projection-based performances, Slow Dive and Wild Flame.

April 2, 2024.

Hi, I’m Kerri (she/they) and I am a 2024 Hammock resident! I am a queer artist, researcher, performer, parent to a toddler, and teacher. I am Finnish from my mom’s side, and Irish/Scottish/English from my dad’s side. I am a settler and uninvited guest who has been living on Lkwungen and W̱SÁNEĆ Territories (Victoria, BC) for the past decade.⁠
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I am an anxious/OCD introvert who has gone from a being most comfortable behind the scenes to centring performance and teaching (a kind of performance?) in my life these days. Getting comfortable with the uncomfortable. I contended with a lot of chronic pain in my teens and 20’s, and have made a lot of art about bowels including wrestling as an evil irritable bowel alongside my stage momager(s), Pesto Dismal (Megan + Kim!). These days I have a different relationship with pain (less chronic?).⁠

For this residency I will be reflecting on my narrative practice which was really starting to take flight during my 2012 Hammock residency. I am going to share some inspirations that have shaped the way I tell stories and work with others, what Heidi noted as ‘quietly weaving communities’ and I will share some new comics that touch on some of the main themes I work with at the moment; relationships to the body, family, the past, parenting, and to the land.

Photos are of myself in front of the rose bush that is always in bloom on my birthday (June) – I started thinking about plants as markers of time after reading Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall-Kimmerer and The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert – who (no surprise) also took inspiration by Robin Wall-Kimmerer), a second portrait that represents how my art practice looks + feels these days – entangled physically and/or emotionally with the care for my child (Ez) and the various stages of pandemic living, a photo of my desk during my time at the (physical) hammock, the launching question for my residency – how and why do I tell stories. And, most importantly, a call for a free Palestine and a permanent ceasefire.

April 3, 2024.

Here are a few slides from Norther Onterrible: Double Dip Road and other tales. This is the project I was working on in during my Hammock Residency in 2012. Please don’t get the wrong impression, I say Northern Onterrible with a lot of love. ⁠
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This was a very sprawling multi-disciplinary project, that came out of an extended period of research and investigation, both personal and archival, into the regional histories of some of my childhood homes. Northern Onterrible is a bittersweet coming of age tale, a folk history and a documentary of the sordid histories of Northern Ontario. ⁠

Much like the way I work now, this project connects the past and present of the communities of my childhood living in Algonquin territory (the Ottawa Valley – Deep River, Pembroke, Petawawa, as well as Anishinabek territory which includes the Ojibwa of Fort William First Nation or Thunder Bay.) Thunder Bay is the place where my parents met in high school (still married – approaching their 50th anniversary), and significantly, is home to the largest Finnish community outside of Finland. ⁠
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The initial idea for this project came first after discovering David Lynch’s interest in my hometown Deep River (pop 5 thousand). “I’m just a girl from a small town called Deep River, Ontario” (Mulholland Drive) was the reference that first caught my attention. I was curious about why he incorporated my small hometown into more than one of his projects. This led me down paths of reddit forums and onto a 1954 article from Macleans Magazine on the oddities of my hometown Deep River, Ontario, called “Almost The Perfect Place to Live” by Peter C. Newman. The article revealed Deep River as the site of Canada’s first nuclear reactor and a once-secret community that came to fruition as part of the Manhattan Pact during the Second World War. The legacy at the time was that Deep River was some kind of utopia, a planned community, full of young scientists (no death and no in-laws the article declared). I was interested in the connection/disconnect between that time and that place, not all that long ago, alongside my own experience of growing up in Deep River. ⁠

I had thought my own experience of living there was fairly typical, a place I loved and didn’t want to leave, but you know, run of the mill small town stuff? Although I did have my picture in the town paper an awful lot – for passing my babysitter’s course, or playing community badminton. Reading more of the history helped me to add some more context to the place, I started to see it in new and different ways.

Photos are from 2011-2012, the first one is of myself painting, then images of wall drawing, embroideries, an archival newspaper photo featuring an article about Deep River, another wall drawing, a still from a paper cut-out stop-motion animation, and an installation of painted book sculptures.

April 4, 2024.

The other focus of Northern Onterrible was about Thunder Bay and my family’s Finnish history. Memories of my grandparents taking me to the Hoito and hearing stories about how my great-grandma would serve pancakes to loggers. Hoito, RIP, is the place we always talked about spreading my grandparents ashes – logistically I don’t know how this would have worked – but it gives you an idea of the significance of this place to my grandparents. Hoito is the Finnish word for care, and the restaurant was created by the Industrial Workers of the Word (IWW) as a means to provide low-cost food that reminded them of home, and a place of belonging. Hoito’s was located in the basement of the Finnish Labour Hall, a building with the words “labour conquers all” inscribed on the arch above the front entrance, a lasting monument preserving the spirit of radicalism that prevailed at that time.⁠

One (of many) things that I became obsessed with was the tradition of fist presses. Fist presses I came to understand as a zine, that Finns in diaspora would write (by hand, but I love all the layer of what fist press could be interpreted as) to create and connect community.⁠

My own relationship to creating zines was from a very different but somewhat also from a similar place of longing for connection, at the time really struggling with anxiety and mental health my first zine – in itself a hugely collaborative project (chelle, kibbs, all the ste em crew), and it ended up including about 30 contributors and was the thing I feel like I had been looking for after some less than perfect experiences in therapy and clinical books etc. It wasn’t a solution, but it was the community I had been looking for.

This last year I returned again to Deep River and brought my family (my partner, their dad, my child) to the beach by my old house and went for a swim. It had been a long day and we had to drive back to Montreal, but when we saw people in the garden outside of my old childhood home I was urged by my partner and their dad to go say hello – something I never would have done otherwise. They were a couple and the same people who had bought the house from my parents in 1996. They took us all around the property, offered us beer. I walked through my old bedroom, the kitchen with the short counter built for my short mom to roll dough, the trees in the yard my dad used to talk to. They told us the story how they met and fell in love. They invited me back to stay anytime I wished, this is your home, they told me. ⁠

April 6, 2024.

Lynda Barry has been a big influence in my life and work for many reasons. Any of my students in recent years have likely heard me talk about Lynda Barry a lot. Lynda Barry helped me learn that there are many styles and ways of making that are valid. ⁠

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I’ve also had a relationship with art as a way of processing and this quote from an interview with Drawn and Quarterly really resonated with me:⁠
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“I don’t think there’s any other reason we have art than to save us, the way our liver is there to keep us alive. I have come to regard the arts as external organs. They have always been as critical to me as my kidneys are. It’s like a dialysis machine you draw yourself.”⁠
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I have also been inspired by Lynda Barry’s auto-biographical work, based on real life experiences, but also breaking free from them at times. From Lynda Barry and many others, like Audre Lorde, I started to consider writing biography as inherently having one foot, or at least a toe in fiction. ⁠I have found that to be a little bit freeing.⁠

April 7, 2024.

I fell in love with the argonauts. To be honest I don’t know if I fully grasp all the layers of theory in this book. But it was also exactly what I had been looking for at the time I first read it.⁠
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At the time I was writing a new performance, The Secrets of Naming Clouds, and it was all about communication, a reverence for what words could do born out of a history of having much go unspoken and hope of what words could heal, a belief that lived in tension perhaps with my relationship with my sister, who is largely non-verbal and everything I have learned through our relationship about many ways to connect and communicate outside of verbal language. ⁠
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I thought for so long this was the most beautiful line – It is idle to fault a net for having holes, my encyclopedia notes. What pulled me so much? ⁠
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This passage also grabbed me from the first few pages of the Argonauts:⁠
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“Before we met, I had spent a lifetime devoted to Wittgenstein’s idea that the inexpressible is contained—inexpressibly!—in the expressed. This idea gets less air time than his more reverential Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent, but it is, I think, the deeper idea. Its paradox is, quite literally, why I write, or how I feel able to keep writing.⁠
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For it doesn’t feed or exalt any angst one may feel about the incapacity to express, in words, that which eludes them. It doesn’t punish what can be said for what, by definition, it cannot be. Nor does it ham it up by miming a constricted throat: Lo, what I would say, were words good enough. Words are good enough.”⁠
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Lately I have been wanting to return to this book, to circle back to Maggie Nelson’s writing on queers/ family and the beauty, histories and tensions here, as I find myself now parent to a child in a queer family. ⁠
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April 8, 2024.

Since 2020 I have been working on a project about fire. My dad, Mike, is a wildfire scientist, and the project is a coming-of-age story about growing up in rural areas, and my relationship with my dad. I will share more about this project in later posts. But this is the context in which I was doing research about fire and read the article Maintaining the Mosaic: The Role of Indigenous Burning in Land Management by Robin Wall Kimmerer and Frank K. Lake. ⁠
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This line has been sitting with me ever since I read it: ⁠
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“Every landscape reflects the history and the culture of the people who inhabit it. The worldview of a society is written more truthfully on the land than in its documents.” ⁠
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There is so much in this sentence, and it made me confront my ideas about how I do research, where I look for stories, and think about all the ways that the land is telling a story too.⁠

April 9, 2024.

Feeling Measurements was a mammoth project with many offshoots and collaborators. One of those collaborations was with Laura Gildner, we did a walk/workshop and a performance together. It was just a real dream to work, collaborate and learn alongside her.⁠
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One of the many things Laura brought to our collaboration was the article Writing Deeper Maps: Mapmaking, Local Indigenous Knowledges, and Literary Nationalism in Native Women’s Writing by Kelli Lyon Johnson. ⁠

Below is an excerpt of our performance where we are interweaving stories, Laura’s voice weaves in reflections of Kelli Lyon Johnson’s article that I wanted to share here. I am telling a story about my parents moving to a house in Edmonton in an area of town where a decade prior I had experienced a traumatic event and was attempting to make sense of these overlapping past and present experiences.⁠
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Laura: Kelli Lyon Johnson describes our connection to space and place as an intricate web of layered significance, something we could never individually attempt to fathom due to its complex intersectional nature and the profoundly plural experiences that lie therein. Place, it seems, is really a time-based medium-something that becomes increasingly populated with story and meaning as the minutes and hours pass. In every step we take, we are both moving through and becoming part of the understanding of a space that can take thousands of individual voices to fully articulate. (Laura)⁠
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Kerri: I’ve come back year after year and continue to make new associations. Learning about the white-tailed jackrabbits that dig holes in the ground all down my parent’s street. The magpies who are described to me as pests but look beautiful to my ignorant eyes. The wild boars that are rumoured to roam the river valley. (Kerri)⁠

April 10, 2024.

I got to know Coco during my time living in Montreal, we had overlaps in community, were both part of the Ste. Emilie Skillshare and later articule. Their art, storytelling and zines have always been an inspiration to me (like pretty much everyone who I spent time with during these Ste. Em years).⁠

Coco had some art and writing featured in the book Secret Life published by Quiet Spell (a real gem of a book!). They wrote this quote:⁠
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“I consider mistakes to be compost instead of rubbish: they are things that⁠
enrich and nourish my drawings. I see them as victories of my creative mind⁠
over my rational mind. They are a visual lapse but if I pay attention,⁠
I consider mistakes to be compost instead of rubbish: they are things that⁠
enrich and nourish my drawings. I see them as victories of my creative mind⁠
over my rational mind. They are a visual lapse but if I pay attention,⁠
something can grow from them.” – Coco Riot⁠
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This framing has helped me so much in the process of making art. So much of the time, especially when I work at all outside of my comfort zone I am quick to judge my work harshly, that it is not good enough, and so on. Now when I go there I try and remember coco’s words! This is also something I share in pretty much every class I teach as well!⁠

April 11, 2024.

Alexis Hogan introduced me to this idea of smuggling. I wish I had a memory that could go back to certain moments and conversations and relive them in a full way. So keep in mind this memory is a bit ghostly, because this is often how my memory functions. ⁠
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Anyways – I think this conversation happened when Alexis and I were collaborating in a project called Feeling Measurements and we had made 4 billboards with images of invasive species printed on risograph and wheat pasted onto plywood. ⁠

We drove out to install billboards into the seemingly ever growing cutblocks in T’Souke and Pacheedaht Territory, cutblocks being places where invasive species, like broom and daphne tend to thrive. Through aesthetics, and the installation of the billboards in a place you might not otherwise expect, we talked about if these billboards could smuggle in ideas around relationship to place and our bodies – you know the kind of things that cause us to take stock of our surroundings in a new way. ⁠
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Smuggling as I came to understand it was also a way to make ideas, points of view, experiences, that are ‘difficult’ as in divisive, or traumatic, political, painful, and so on, more accessible, make it easier to get closer to them. When I asked Alexis about it recently she shared that the concept of smuggling was shared with her by Raymond Boisjoly who had referenced this in relation to Irit Rogoff’s concept of smuggling in ‘Smuggling’ – An Embodied Criticality.⁠
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I’ve continued to think a lot about this idea, and in my work The third image in this series is an excerpt of animation about washing the dishes – or rather re-washing the dishes, something I am more prone to do when my OCD is activated. In this work I attempt to use the charm of hand drawing, pretty colours, and humour as a way to make discussions of mental health/neurodivergence more accessible. Smuggling!?⁠

In thinking of this time I also want to name my supervisor at the time, Jennifer Stillwell, who supported these conversations as well, and introduced me to Philip Auslander/Peter Brooks and “Holy theatre” and catharsis as well. (Holy theatre is concerned with impacting audiences affective state – Peter Brook coined the term “holy theatre” to describe performance that aspires to the communication of intangible, universal levels of experience: “the currents that rule our lives,” a reality deep than the fullest form of everyday life.”)

April 13, 2024.

Slow Dive is a queer exploration of embodiment and the conscious and unconscious histories we carry in our bodies. An auto-fictography that follows a queer coming-of-age tale, spanning the course of 20 years. The story is told through a series of non-linear vignettes that combine lyrical narrative, experimental documentary, and historical research.⁠

A relationship to swimming and themes of water move throughout the narrative, drawing on symbolism and parallels to portray embodiment, grief, self-love, and queer identity. Alongside personal narratives and reflections, Slow Dive collages research-based historical accounts such as the colonial roots of the breaststroke, the unsettling origins of hydrotherapy, and the mythology of clams. Queer cultural references are also interwoven such as, the hanky code, the first ‘lesbian’ kiss on Star Trek and how Hans Christian Andersen’s rumoured bisexuality is reflected in the Little Mermaid.⁠
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Slow Dive is a performance and Slow Dive is also a comic – because I felt the need for it to exist this way as well. The planning of it has overwhelmed me somewhat, but I am thinking of sharing it as a webcomic in segments like you see here. ⁠
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I regularly change the aesthetics and mediums of this work (I have a hard time committing to an aesthetic and making decisions), but currently it is mostly done in pencil crayon simulation with Procreate. I have a probably foolish dream that this version is the blue print and I will also create a version by (non-digital) hand at some point?!⁠

There are so many people have shaped this work over the years in direct and indirect ways, I will do my best to name them all here!

Dramaturge: Sarah Elkashelf (PWM)
Director: Emma Tibaldo
Design: Catherine Hahn, potatocakes
Sound: Estraven Lupino-Smith
Editors/General Feedback from: Alien Press (Astrid Johanson/Maria), Elizabeth Charters, Kriss Li, Kir Tancon, Kim Smith, Oren Levine, Kay Pettigrew, Jenna Ten-Yukk (Firefly Creative Writing), Claire Lyke (alongside choreography experiments), all of you who showed up for talk-backs
Clowning workshop and direction/performance feedback: Britt Small
Residency: OUTstages (Intrepid Theatre) with support from Sean Guist.
Funders: Intrepid, Canada Council for the Arts, BC Arts Council

April 14, 2024.

Slow Dive is a queer exploration of embodiment and the conscious and unconscious histories we carry in our bodies⁠
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This comic is continuing on from yesterdays post – Slow Dive in comic form part 2.⁠ ⁠

April 15, 2024.

Slow Dive is a queer exploration of embodiment and the conscious and unconscious histories we carry in our bodies⁠
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This comic is continuing on from yesterdays post – Slow Dive in comic form part 3.

April 16, 2024.

Slow Dive Comic 4/6. Slow Dive is a queer exploration of embodiment and the conscious and unconscious histories we carry in our bodies⁠.⁠ This part of the story is about the rumoured depths of my hometown, Deep River.⁠

April 17, 2024.

Slow Dive Comic 5/6. Slow Dive is a queer exploration of embodiment and the conscious and unconscious histories we carry in our bodies⁠.⁠
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This comic is outlining my obsession with the measurement of the fathom, that came into my orbit after I read a book literally (I think) called the history of measurement. ⁠

April 18, 2024.

Slow Dive Comic 6/6. Slow Dive is a queer exploration of embodiment and the conscious and unconscious histories we carry in our bodies⁠.⁠
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Still jumping around, this is much later on in the story ⁠and is about family and ‘the hanky code’/⁠

April 19, 2024.

I was obsessed with the Disney version of the Little Mermaid. I invented a mermaid stroke when I was a kid, and then returned to watching at night when I was a teenager who struggled with sleep.⁠
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More recently I read about the original version which was written by Hans Christian Andersen when he was in his 30’s.⁠
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There are lot of differences with the Disney version – maybe the biggest one is that the mermaid does not have a happy ending, the prince marries some human and the Mermaid, who is not named Ariel but just nameless Mermaid, dances at the Prince’s wedding and turns to foam.⁠
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Hans was a talented and poor child who started creating plays at a young age. He found a rich patron in Jonas Collins, who was impressed by his work and became his official guardian.⁠
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Jonas brought him home where Hans met his son, Edvard. At first Edvard was unimpressed by Hans, who was a strange boy, but when Edvard began to tutor him in Latin and grammar, the two forged a close bond. After Hans left the Collins’ home, he began a deeply intimate correspondence with Edvard.⁠
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In a letter he wrote “My sentiments for you are those of a woman. The femininity of my nature and our friendship must remain a mystery.” In another letter he confessed to Edvard that he had brought a “provincial rose” up to his bed, kissed it religiously, and placed it under his pillow. ⁠
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Edvard did not seem to reciprocate Hans’s level of affection and supposedly facing familial pressures, Edvard announced plans to get married to a woman named Henriette. ⁠
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Hans is devastated. He attempted to stop the marriage, to no avail. The year that Edvard married Henriette is apparently the year that Hans wrote The Little Mermaid.⁠

April 20th, 2024.

For the last few years I have been working on a project about fire. I have been inspired to do so in part as a way to get closer to my dad, a fire scientist. Fire has been more on my radar now in recent years. Smoke is a way I experience fire, almost annually these days.⁠
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My dad is an expert in predictive services, in looking to the future. I am someone who is always drawn to the past, to the history of things, so he also connected me with people who could speak more to the history of fire.⁠
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These images are stills from an animation that features an excerpt of a conversation I had with director of the UBC tree ring lab Lori Daniels, asking her about histories and attitudes towards fire:⁠
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“That kind of perspective or perspective that I think is really dominated our landscapes for the last hundred to one hundred and fifty years after colonization and European settlement in western North America, that European perspective was that fire was damaging and bad. And that it put human lives and communities at risk. And certainly there were big forest fires early on in the early 1900’s that did burn down communities that cost people lives. And that really reinforced that perception that fire is bad. And it led to the policies that have really dominated for one hundred years that we need to protect lives, communities, livelihoods, including forests and rangelands from fire. And so we’ve had these policies and practices about trying to detect and put out fires, thinking we were doing the right thing, that we were protecting all of these values that are so important to us. And, of course, the unintended consequence that we had no idea we were creating over such large areas was by removing this really critical ecological process, this evolutionary force that gave us diversity in our forests and habitats and a whole bunch of biodiversity that goes along with that, by removing that agent of disturbance, we really began this cascading effect of how forests have changed.”⁠

April 21st, 2024.

One of my favourite things to learn about fire is all the different kind of relationship the non-human world has with fire. Many species thrive with fire, or have adaptions to survive fire. One person I talked with Cordie Tymstra said the boreal forest without fire is like the rainforest without rain. That really struck me, how integral fire is to so many ecosystems. Cordie talked to me about species like the fire chaser beetle that seek out forest fires and use freshly burned trees to lay their eggs.⁠
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This is an excerpt of a conversation I had with my dad on the topic, I am asking him about how I have heard him talk about how the boreal forest is designed to burn.⁠
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“You heard me say the boreal forest is here to burn, okay? It’s survives and even thrives in a regime of stand-renewing stand-replacing fire, crown fires. And they have strategies to deal with it, whether it’s serotinous cones that have that waxy resin, and fire is the heat that melts that resin so that the seeds can be released. Or with Aspen, the above ground tree dies, but the rootstock survives and the fire goes through and you get a whole bunch of little aspen saplings, like hair on a dogs back. So it’s used to fire, and for for many reasons, for biodiversity, keeping pests, bugs at bay, disease at bay, it’s a cleansing agent, it’s resetting the clock, the cycle of life, whatever you want to call it, fire is a natural component.”⁠

April 22nd, 2024.

Through working on this project around fire with my dad, a fire scientist, I have been thinking a lot about our relationship. Once I tried to find a photo of us together as adults. Instead I I found a series of photos of me and my dad in separate but parallel photos. Like taking turns standing next to cool plants, with my sister, taking turns standing next to the same cactus, picking oranges, drinking beer.⁠
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April 23rd, 2024.

I remember first learning about how to care for plants as an adult and the surprise of learning that to promote growth or yield more berries or flowers, you often need to cut plants back. I have witnessed this most intimately through my partner, Oren, who is constantly fretting over our house plants, and suffers when a plant isn’t thriving. Part of their plant care strategy for rescuing struggling plants is to cut them down to their base. I witness many of our plants come back to life, happier than ever.⁠

I googled definitions of ocd and found myself to be a textbook case of a number of the examples given and was shocked how it hadn’t come up before. The impressions I had of ocd were probably mostly formed by pop culture and these representations had never resonated. Though I have started to watch Monk “the obsessive compulsive detective”. One of the many complications I feel watching the show is how up front and out in the open monk is about his ocd (short of actually talking about having ocd, which is noteable), whereas I feel like I have so many strategies to try and mask it.

April 26th, 2024.

Today’s post is from a newer project, of turning down drawings and notes I have taken since deciding to try and get pregnant and turn it into a comic. This is potentially the beginning of this story and starting out talking about gendered expectations around being a care giver and having kids, and how for me those expectations changed with time. ⁠
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Side note: A long time ago I wrote a comic for Guts magazine based on the history of babysitting and a time of babysitters unionizing – which was a really cool history to learn about.⁠

April 27th, 2024.

My final comic for the hammock residency is about Janet Lansbury and setting boundaries. Janet Lansbury is an educator who has written some books and has a podcast that I was introduced to after Ezra was born. It is kind of shocking to me how something that maybe seems pretty obvious and straightforward like that it’s healthy to set limits with your kids (or in general) was something that wasn’t fully on my radar, at least not yet while he is still so little. I’ve just wanted to keep Ezra safe, but listening to Janet Lansbury talk about boundaries and limits has helped me to reframe what trying to keep Ezra safe and healthy could look look like.⁠
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On this note, it’s an incredibly beautiful and wildly challenging rollercoaster to parent. I did not have the easiest birth, and had some postpartum challenges, but I experienced all these challenges in relative safety and comfort on a day-to-day basis. My heart breaks thinking about the many thousands of Palestinian people, children, parents who have been killed by Israel. Each day I hope for the liberation of all Palestinians.⁠