Made in Epekwitk: How a Mi'kmaw artist draws with fire

The kind of art that I do is called pyrography. The word pyrography actually means to write with fire. So that’s essentially what I do, but draw and like create. I guess I write a little bit, but so you just take like a pen that’s red, hot or kind of almost a razor and you draw with it. So you’re drawing with fire and you’re creating with fire. My name is Annie Martin. I am from Millbrook First Nation. I’ve lived on PEI for over 10 years and I’m an artist that does pyrography or wood burning and my business is called Rose Wolf Creations. I just started doing hats recently and like, I’m not stylish or anything like that, but to see people wearing them and it like looking amazing in them and like you can put it on the wall and it’s art. When I step back and finish something that’s more detailed like this, I’m like whoa, it’s almost like you go somewhere else and you come back and you see like I just did that with these, you can’t draw on them. You can’t do anything in advance. So it’s a lot of free handing, like deciding what the the main focus is of it or what elements you want to have in it and then just making it work. It’s a lot of like trusting the process and and figuring it out as you go. So being Migma, both my parents are Migma. I’m also a little bit Scottish and a little bit Irish and I grew up knowing and being proud to be Migma. My mom would speak Migma words to us, like we went to some sweats and that sort of thing. But like, you know, you get into your teens and you kind of kind of tap out of that a little bit, just, you know, life happens and but this is where I learned more and felt more, felt more connected and felt more myself. Like not just having the art, but also connecting to being magma and understanding it from my own way. I find inspiration for my designs everywhere. Like obviously with nature, obviously with being magma, but just kind of seeing like what is out there. Like, if I see a piece of art and there’s a really cool tree on it, it’s like, that’s that’s a different way to do a tree. Or I’ve looked at a lot of my mom’s work or my dad’s work and been like, whoa, like there’s a whole other way to think of doing art, that it’s taking inspiration from them or taking inspiration from other art or other things, but turning it into your own thing. My dad always said, like, you can only be an artist if you look at art every day. So I create. If I go a couple days without burning, I feel like I don’t feel like myself and it’s not just because I’m not doing something productive, but it’s it’s like meditative for me. It’s calming. It’s it’s just grounding for me what goes into something or what the history or where this petroglyph was found. Like knowing those things that you see but you don’t understand. So it’s really taught me to like understand what I’m doing and also kind of like knowing you’re it’s a nod to your ancestors, but it’s also a modern version. Like it’s it’s not the traditional mediums that our people did it on, but it’s it’s keeping it alive in little, little tributes.