Opening Celebration
Fireline Kinship
Opening Celebration
2 October 2025
5:00-8:00pm
Taylor Baptiste, Fireline Kinship, 2025, Film still. Courtesy of the artist.
Please join us for the opening celebration of Fireline Kinship by Taylor Baptiste on Thursday October 2, 2025. This program is free and open to all.
At 6:00pm, a xʷməθkʷəy̓əm welcome and drum and song will be performed by Alec Dan and his team, followed by an Okanagan song and Candance Gabriel’s Water Song, sung by Aimee Baptiste, and a speech from Executive Director of the Nk’Mip Desert Cultural Center, Jenna Bower.
Fireline Kinship by Taylor Baptiste of the Osoyoos Indian Band, and Syilx Okanagan Nation, is an exhibition that powerfully considers the deep interconnection between land, body, memory and visual language. Prompted by the urgent pressures of climate catastrophe in her home territory and the 2021 Nk’Mip Wildfire, Baptiste has cultivated a visual response that reflects on both the devastation of fire and its role as a natural force of renewal and transformation.
Drawing from Syilx storytelling, ceremony, and ways of knowing, Fireline Kinship considers how future landscapes, dreams, and teachings are intimately tied to the territory itself. The artworks in the exhibition honour the firefighters who risk their lives to protect homes, people, and the land—a courageous role of critical importance.
Fireline Kinship invites viewers to listen closely—to the land, to memory, and to the possibilities that arise from collective strength and care. It is a reflection on loss and renewal, fear and hope, and the enduring bonds that hold people together. The exhibition celebrates how resilience and solidarity come to emerge when communities face shared challenges.
Fireline Kinship marks the first solo presentation of all artworks within the exhibition, including several sculptures created by transforming firefighter equipment into regalia. These are presented alongside the premiere of a newly commissioned film work, wherein the sculptural regalia are activated through healing dance, ceremony and song upon the territory in which they were conceived.
With Support From
Participant Bios
Taylor Baptiste
Taylor Baptiste is an interdisciplinary artist from the Osoyoos Indian Band of the Okanagan Nation, who draws upon her upbringing in Nk’mip—a field 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 art practice is deeply rooted in her family, community and ancestral history. Moreover, she incorporates elements of Syilx storytelling and epistemologies, reflecting a connection to the land and waters of the Okanagan.
Taylor sculpturally blends Okanagan land-based materials and Syilx traditional practices with contemporary mediums and modes of making; working with materials ranging from ochre pigment, buckskin, rocks, beadwork, sinew and ready-made materials. While sculpture serves as her primary mode of expression, Taylor’s artistic repertoire also encompasses digital illustration, painting, photography, and most recently, film and projection.
Her long-term goals are to create new Syilx public art installations throughout the Okanagan Valley and to create artwork that can go back into Okanagan communities homes and ceremonies. In May of 2024, Taylor received a Bachelor of Fine Arts: Visual Arts Degree from Emily Carr University of Art & Design with a specialization in Sculpture. She now resides with her husband in the traditional territory of xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), colonially known as Vancouver.