Gina (Daisy) Laing, The Beach, c.1954-64
Gina (Daisy) Laing (Ah-ooma-took, Uchucklesaht First Nation) painted The Beach, created while she was a student at the Alberni Indian Residential School, offers a quiet yet powerful example of how children’s artworks from these institutions can carry memory across time. Executed in tempera on paper, the composition is deceptively simple. Bands of colour organize the landscape: deep blue water fills the foreground, while a gently curving shoreline separates sea from land, and soft atmospheric tones suggest distant hills and sky. The painting’s calm rhythm contrasts sharply with the institutional environment in which it was produced.
Like Jeffrey Cook, Laing benefitted from art sessions at the Alberni school led by Robert Aller. Rather than teaching formal techniques or European models, Aller encouraged children to paint images that mattered to them. Laing’s painting reflects precisely this impulse. The beach she depicts is the shoreline of her childhood home on Vancouver Island, a place where she played, swam, and gathered food from the water. The image carries the sensory memory of that environment. The shoreline arcs gently across the page, forming a protective boundary between land and sea. No human figures appear, yet the painting is filled with presence. The land itself becomes the keeper of memory.
The absence of houses is also significant. In later reflections, Laing explained that she avoided painting homes because of the violence she experienced in family life shaped by the legacy of residential schools. Instead, the landscape becomes the space of freedom and belonging. The beach recalls a time before separation, when family teachings and relationships with the natural world shaped daily life.
Laing would later speak openly about the role of art in her healing process. Reflecting on the return of her childhood paintings and her decision to share them publicly, she explained: “I want to tell my story. I want people to hear right from the victim and find out what happened. To understand what I went through and feel it too.” Through this act of testimony, Laing transforms a childhood painting into a voice within the larger history of residential schools. Seen today, The Beach is more than a child’s memory of place. It is an early act of visual testimony that preserves a relationship to land and culture.
