Paula Wesley is NWCC's newest full-time student blogger!
Paula is currently a second-year First Nations Fine Arts student at NWCC's Freda Diesing School of Northwest Coast Art. She is from the Wolf people from Coast Salish and also is Tsimshian, born in 1976 in Terrace, BC, where she currently resides. Says Paula: "I feel inspired by the art of my people. I create art to continue what our people started long before me, to express my cultures and represent our people through art."
Paula's mother is Coast Salish from Chilliwack, her father is Tsimshian from Port Essington. It is unique to mix these two cultures to create my own style, she says.
Over the fall and winter semesters, she'll be giving her take on student life at NWCC. We're excited to see and read her posts and encourage you - the college community - to follow along.
Hi, I’m Paula Wesley. I’m in my second year at Freda Diesing Art School working on carving projects. I just wanted to share with you a thought that popped up today. It has been a mind-boggling week of trying to figure out how to balance my life with Art history research. From what I have learned in the last few weeks, I have started to find more about who I am. The more I dig, the more I discover about how Art is important to me and how I want to share this knowledge with generations to come.
I see that most artists struggle; in life, that is common and this builds strength. Becoming an artist, I accept that I will have this struggle and fight for survival, but that the purpose of these struggles is to make me stronger.
I identify myself as a visual artist, but also I use my other senses. How do I define these? You all know that we have five traditional senses: sight, touch, smell, taste and hearing. Well, so far, you probably have not realized that “hearing” does not have any effect on me. In this blog, I want to educate people and make them aware that Deaf people can do anything other people can do except hear. I have already made my Deafness my strength since I have decided I don’t want to be invisible to the world.
The Deaf use their facial expressions, hands and body language – they depend on it for their communication. For non-Deaf people, 85% of communication is non-verbal through body language, facial expressions and tones, but most people aren’t aware of this. So often, non-Deaf people will say very different things with their bodies than with their words. Deaf people pick up on this very quickly.
However, in spite of the differences, Deaf people do all the same things as the non-Deaf. Deaf people can drive, get groceries, forget our homework. Do I seem like a different person than you? I think my hopes and dreams would seem very similar to yours. I hope one day we can meet and you will feel the same.
Stay tuned, next blog post will be about how Deaf Culture parallels Native Culture.