Jackie Olson 2025 Finalist

Artist Bio

Jackie Olson was born and raised in Dawson City and is a citizen of the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in First Nation. Trained as a painter, Jackie received a BFA from the Alberta College of Art in 1992, and has been creating and learning new art forms since. Jackie’s work has been featured in exhibitions across Canada including the Walter Phillips Gallery (Banff, AB), Harcourt House (Edmonton, AB), and a forthcoming solo exhibition at the ODD Gallery (Dawson City, YT). Her work lives in many private and public collections, including the Bavaria State Anthropology Museum (Germany), Indigenous Art Centre (Canada), and the Yukon Permanent Art Collection (Canada). Jackie holds a faculty position with the Yukon School of Visual Arts, and recently curated the DIRE exhibition in Dawson City, which invited several Indigenous northern artists to create new works honouring salmon-as-life. In 2022 Jackie was awarded the Yukon Hall of Innovator’s Lifetime Achievement Award for her transformative reimagining of age-old Yukon practices as an inspired new way of creating art.

Artist Statement

In my artistic practice I work through processes of reclamation, witnessing and accompanying the regrowth of nature in the wake of miners’ destruction of the surface of the land. I work with willow, which is what first grows back over the machinery and rubble. Watching the way willow grows and working with willow to make my art is a way to learn from nature, and to understand how nature responds and adapts to the invasions and destructions caused by mining. Willow teaches me how to have hope when I see how the miners treat the land, and through my artistic practice I try to witness and communicate that hope. I have also been involved in advocacy and governance of the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in Nation. Through these 1intertwined practices I have tried to resist the extraction of resources from our community and tried to help our community grow and thrive.

I make work that wants to be returned to the land, many of my works have already been curated back by the land. My art practice is process-based: I break down willow to its fibres, I cast and recast paper forms, as I walk through the bush I collect elements from the land that show up later in my paintings and sculptures. I am always making and unmaking: process is the key to a successful art piece. Connecting with my ancestors through the materials they used in their daily lives is a powerful part of my practice. I learn how they used materials and then bring it into a contemporary context. It is all about connection: these lessons make me realize how far our families have gone away from living on the land. Growing up on the land taught me valuable lessons and shaped who I am an artist. Connection to past and present is key to being grounded in the now. The works I have included represent the scope of my practice and my desire to work at a larger scale.