Free

Free Borsey grew up on the Lummi Reservation, raised by his uncle and aunt with deep roots in the land and water of the Salish Sea. His childhood was spent fishing, hunting, running in the woods above West Shore, and playing in the tides on the mudflats. That immersion shaped everything that followed.

As a teenager, Free joined a 38-day, approximately 650-mile canoe journey that would become a turning point in his relationship to Lummi culture and tradition. The experience of paddling ancestral waters, of moving through the land at the pace the land requires, became the foundation of his practice as an artist and advocate.

After returning from Olympia at the end of COVID, he joined Children of the Setting Sun Productions, where he spent time traveling to interview elders and community leaders, documenting the knowledge and voices that hold the culture together. That work shifted him toward Native Environmental Science and toward art as a form of cultural preservation and activation, not documentation.

His visual practice blends Coast Salish formline with realism, grounding traditional imagery in the land and ecology that gave rise to it. He describes his art as "a map in a way. It should reflect the land, the people of that territory and what teachings these people received from the land." He brings that orientation to every mural: the wall is not a canvas. It is a piece of land that the story lives on.