Talks
Artist Talk: Fireline Kinship
Conversation with Taylor Baptiste
22 November 2025
2:00pm
Image Courtesy of Taylor Baptiste. Photo: Geoffrey Wallang
Join us for an afternoon with Okanagan artist Taylor Baptiste as she discusses her exhibition Fireline Kinship in conversation with Or Gallery Interim Director Autumn Coppaway. Together, they will explore the relationships between land, fire, and kinship that shape Baptiste’s artistic practice.
Through this conversation, Baptiste will reflect on fire as both a destructive and regenerative force – a teacher, relative, and a source of renewal. She will share how her work engages Indigenous knowledge systems, material practices, and the act of coming together as expressions of care and continuity.
The discussion will touch on themes of kinship beyond the human, collaboration with the land, and the role of art in times of ecological and cultural transformation. Audiences will be invited to consider how practices of reciprocity and renewal can guide our relationships with one another and with the living world around us.
Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Fireline Kinship, on view at Or Gallery from October 2 to December 13, 2025, this program is free and open to all.
Participant Bios
Taylor Baptiste
Taylor Baptiste is an interdisciplinary artist from the Osoyoos Indian Band of the Syilx Okanagan Nation. Her practice is deeply rooted in her upbringing in Nk’Mip—a landscape of sagebrush and wild roses nestled between the mountains and Osoyoos Lake on the Osoyoos Indian Band reservation. Raised by Richard and Colleen Baptiste, her work is shaped by a strong connection to family, community, and ancestral history. Drawing from Syilx storytelling and ways of knowing, Taylor’s art reflects an ongoing relationship with the tmxʷulaxʷ (land) and tmixʷ (all living energies) of the Okanagan. Her practice is guided by a yearning to bridge ancestral knowledge with contemporary forms of expression—working to uphold, reimagine, and carry forward Syilx ways of being in today’s shifting world.
Taylor’s primary medium is sculpture, through which she blends Okanagan land-based materials and Syilx traditional practices with contemporary forms and approaches. She works with a wide range of materials, including ochre pigment, buckskin, rocks, sinew, beadwork, and found or ready-made objects. Her interdisciplinary practice also extends to digital illustration, painting, photography, film, projection, and most recently, performance. Open to exploring many mediums, Taylor approaches each project with curiosity and a commitment to the stories and places that shape her.
In 2024, Taylor earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Emily Carr University of Art + Design. She has since returned to her home territory, where she lives with her husband and works both as an artist and as the Cultural Coordinator at the Nk’Mip Desert Cultural Centre. These dual roles are deeply interconnected; her work at the Centre supports and extends her artistic practice through community-based research and archiving, the repatriation of cultural and ancestral belongings, and the facilitation of workshops that center Syilx knowledge, land-based teachings, and cultural continuity. This reciprocal relationship between her art and community work allows her to uphold and contribute to the living cultural knowledge while continuing to evolve as a contemporary Syilx artist.