Sâkohtwâw, bailey macabre
A small art display on a white pedestal. At the center sits a smooth, gray, rounded form. Arranged around it are several modified hospital-style ID wristbands. The bands are white with printed text, barcodes, and plastic snaps, but they have been heavily embellished with beadwork.
Each piece uses a different color scheme—red, black, blue, purple, and gold. Some bands have beads stitched neatly along the edges, while others feature dangling strands. One central piece stands out with long red beaded strands hanging down, like fringe, from the top of the gray base.
Nearby are small plastic bead containers, one open with loose beads scattered.
Title: Sâkohtwâw
Artist: bailey macabre
Date: 2025
Medium/Materials: Beads, hospital bracelets, found objects
Dimensions: 30 cm x 30 cm
Form/Genre: Assemblage, patient narrative
Key Terms/Subject/Tags: Chronic illness; Disability; Datafication; Indigenous Resilience; Transgender
Artist Statement:
Sâkohtwâw is a body of work centered on beaded hospital bracelets and pill bottles gathered over two years of disability-related hospitalizations. These objects are charged sites of medical authority: they carry bailey macabre’s deadname, misgender them, and translate their body into data points within healthcare systems that routinely fail Indigenous, disabled, and trans people. In their original form, they function as tools of surveillance, control, and erasure. Through beadwork, macabre transforms them into acts of reclamation, refusal, and care.
Beading is both a cultural practice and a method of slow witnessing. The labour required to cover these clinical materials resists the speed and disposability of institutional medicine, allowing grief, anger, and healing to coexist. This process reasserts agency over objects that once marked moments of vulnerability, restoring relationality between body, story, and material.
Two large-scale photographic works extend this reclamation by engaging the visual language of museums and ethnographic display. By placing the beaded hospital bracelet and pill bottle within carefully staged photographs, macabre confronts the ways Indigenous art is often sanitized, contained, or severed from lived experience. These images ask who controls how Indigenous bodies and knowledge are seen, archived, and legitimized.
This work engages the exhibition’s themes of Indigenous sovereignty in health, reclaiming the patient narrative, and systems and structures by bearing witness to healthcare as a site of ongoing colonial harm while asserting self-determination through art. Sâkohtwâw insists that Indigenous, disabled, and trans patients are not passive subjects of care, but active authors of their own embodied knowledge.
Cultural Context/Story Behind the Work:
These hospital bracelets and pill bottles were collected over two years of disability related hospitalizations and beaded during my residency at The Banff Center for Arts and Creativity.
Rights for this Image:
This digital image is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0. You are free to share it for non-commercial purposes, as long as you credit the artist.
Learn More:
Instagram: @cedarsageskoden