Lynne Allen (born 1949, USA)
'Untitled. Moccasins'
2000
Etching on handmade paper, cut and stitched to shape
Each approx. 7 x 8.5 x 21 cm
Purchased through the Julie and Robert Breckman Print Fund
Museum no. E.3584:1-2-2004

Lynne Allen is of Native American descent. She started making work relating to her heritage after reading journals kept by her great grandmother, Josephine Waggoner. Waggoner was from the Teton Lakota also known as Dakota or Sioux. She married a white man but throughout her life she remained acutely aware of the problems facing her own people and kept careful records of events affecting their lives. In several flat paper works Allen addressed the disease and decimation resulting from colonisation of Native American lands by white men but she also made a number of three-dimensional objects with similar themes, using the vellum of some 19th century English land-ownership documents found in a flea market. Allen was intrigued by an implicit relationship between these documents and the herding of natives into reservations, since they came from the same time frame.

She soaked, etched and stretch-dried the vellum before stitching it up into little purses or arrow slings. The vellum was decorated with texts and pictogram-style drawings found in Waggoner's journals which had been transferred to the etching plate by scanning or photomechanical means - with further decorations added by hand. To make these moccasins Allen printed similar designs onto sheets of handmade paper, some decorated with pulp-painted stencils of cowboys chasing Indians. She then cut, shaped and stitched  these papers and coated the finished pieces with shellac to protect the surface and give an appearance of deer hide. This pair incorporates a transferred image from a stamp found in a craft shop. At first sight the stamp looks like hand-writing, on closer inspection it turns out to be meaningless scribble. It appealed to the Allen both for its illusory and allusory aspects; 'it suggested', she says, 'lost history, the fate of so much Native American culture'.