Melissa Silk Review, 2020
In this scholarly work, Fiore presents the relationship between the Yagan First Nations people of Tierra del Fuego, the land, water and sociocultural systems as not only represented in images applied to tools, ornaments, non-utilitarian objects and bones, but also evident in material procurement and pigment production processes, which they traditionally used to create a wide array of body paintings, many of which embody ancestral beings and spirits with deep connections to the fauna and landscape. Such connections are still very present and active in the Yagan First Nation. We would be wrong to assume there is, or was, little connection between art/making and the Southern Ocean given its proximity to the ancestral territories of Tierra del Fuego’s Indigenous populations.
