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About

 
 

Lindsay Dawn Dobbin is a Kanien'kehá:ka - Acadian - Irish water protector, musician, sound artist, storyteller and lifelong learner who gratefully lives, listens and creates in Wabanaki Territory, following the cycles of the tide. Dobbin was born in and belongs to the Kennebecasis Valley, a tidal tributary of the Wolastoq ("beautiful river"), in the traditional territory of the Wəlastəkwiyik and Mi’kmaq. Dobbin has lived throughout Wabanaki Territory, mostly around the Bay of Fundy, as well as in Yukon, Kwanlin Dün territory.

Dobbin's relational and place-responsive practice is a living process that follows curiosity rather than form with the intent of understanding and kinship—the way of water. As a human being with intersecting identities as well as personal and ancestral displacement and trauma, their practice honours direct experience as a way of coming to (un)know while listening for the shared beingness, life and resilience in meeting waters.

Dobbin’s transdisciplinary work in sound art, percussion, performance, sculpture, pedagogy, curation and writing places wonder, listening, collaboration, play and improvisation at the centre of creativity. Through exploring the connection between the environment and the body and engaging in a sensorial intimacy with land and waters, their practice aims to bring attention to the world as witness, teacher and collaborator in learning—making visible and audible our interdependence with the larger web of living beings and systems in which human life is embedded.

An active creative collaborator, learner/sharer and teacher, Dobbin has worked with Elders, children, animals, plants, musicians, dancers, filmmakers, scientists, writers, visual artists, sound artists, curators, architects, healers, herbalists and many more. They engage in continual migrations of connection and are committed to co-creating passage over separation and distance. Their work has been presented nationally and internationally, and they are the recipient of the Arts Nova Scotia Emerging Artist Award (2019) and the Canada Council for the Arts’ Robert Fleming Prize (2022), which is annually awarded to an emerging composer in so-called Canada.

Often found alongside animals and plants as well as within the waters of gender expansion, Dobbin is grateful for the (tr)ancestral sanctuaries and lineages of (more-than-)human beings who hold them within a vast web of expression, witnessed and transmitted through love. Their practice is a commitment to sharing the support and learnings that have been poured into them by the Elders, teachers, ancestors and children in their life.

Read my commitments.

 

“Listening As Wayfinding” Menagoesengo/Les Îles-de-la-Madeleine (photo: Nigel Quinn)

 

Top image of “Water Drumming” on Minas Basin, Bay of Fundy (photo: Lucas Ferguson-Sharp).

 
 

Lindsay Dawn Dobbin gratefully acknowledges the support of: