News — four host nations

There are few Coast Salish printmakers working with traditional Coast Salish forms and shapes. In the Northwest Coast art market, there is a high demand for artworks based on formline design, as seen in the art within British Columbia's northern First Nations cultures. This demand can encourage artists from southern BC and Washington State to adopt a formline, formalised mode of production, even though Salish and Makah design is often fluid and abstracted. In general, Indigenous groups from the south of British Columbia and Washington State did not create totem poles and were not as strictly bound to crest-based social...