During the winter of 2022, PAF spoke with Nico Williams ᐅᑌᒥᐣ, an artist based in Tiohtiá:ke|Montreal who is working on a collaborative project with PAF member and visual artist Hannah Ranger for Art Beyond Borders 2021. This project is part of PAF's programming related to artists + artmaking from a distance during COVID.
Nico Williams ᐅᑌᒥᐣ is Anishinaabe and a member of the Aamjiwnaang First Nation community. He has a multidisciplinary, often collaborative practice that is centered around sculptural beadwork. Translating everyday, accessible objects into beadwork re-presents regular things from our daily lives to reattune us to their attraction and code-switching, overlapping, shifting resonances across cultural contexts and modes of identity. This deep layering of held meaning about the connectivity of the past and present, cross-cultural interweaving, and both the harshness and beauty of our current reality shapes and motivates his practice.
This conversation is from a virtual studio visit that PAF communications lead Lissa M. Cowan had with Nico Williams. The interview was originally recorded on the unsurrendered traditional lands of the Algonquin people.
So we're in the studio of Nico Williams and he just told me before we started recording that he has a deadline, something that normally takes about three weeks, and they have to do it in four days, so wow!
Portrait by Paul Litherland.
Oh yeah great, here's sort of what we're doing right now: it's a shipping container pattern that becomes this beautiful sort of sculpture in 3D at the end, and it's sugarcane plants that are going over the font here, it's a Chinese China shipping container company. My studio is right beside a shipping yard, so what I did is I went out this summer and I drew all the little images on all the cars and I turned them into these sort of psychedelic patterns that spin around.
Amazing! They're beautiful.
Oh, thank you.
So Covid happened, almost two years ago, and I know that your practice is very collaborative: you do very, very detailed sculptural beadwork, that just blows my mind, to tell you the truth. And I know that you work with a team of people, sometimes at your kitchen table, sometimes at your studio. So, how did that work for you, anyway?
Well, it was sort of a blessing for the studio practice. I would like to look at it that way, in good spirits and because it gave us time to actually work on projects, stretch ideas. Right before the world shut down it was very very busy. There was a lot of chaos going on, where I was flying everywhere. I was supposed to do an exhibition in Singapore, and then I had an exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art coming up, and when Covid hit it started to shut down all these plans to go fly and give talks or participate in workshops.
And then, it gave me time to really just be settled here in Tiohtià:ke and to really work with Sam (a beader helper) and other team members, and really focus on putting more details into the work, having larger projects start. Behind me, is going to be a large beaded chair coming up for 2022.
And then with the pandemic, the first thing I bought was this little printer here right before everything shut down. And I started printing out things from the computer after and then we were able to start doing collaborative projects that way, so it really changed the way artists are working with collaborative projects, or working with things that take time, and that's why this was exciting when Art Beyond Borders had contacted me. Because we're going to be able to work with Tiohtià:ke and Wakefield (where PAF is close to)… So it's really great to be doing this online, and sharing that experience with other artists.
It's fantastic. So when Covid hit, and you realized as the world did that this was actually not just going to be a two-week thing and we're going to be getting back to normal, was there a bit of a kind of pause where you stopped what you were doing in terms of your practice and, how did it evolve to what you're doing now, which you're saying is larger projects?
Well, we were in a studio and then we got evicted from that studio because it was a government sort of building and we had to be out of there, and so we all started working independently at home.
When we were working on that Sick Kids monument for the brave, we had four of us, all over the city weaving pieces of it, and I was "oh my gosh I need to get a studio", so we got one at the RCA Building, in Saint-Henri. We were there for a shared moment and then that person gave up their space so then we moved to a studio by the Jacques Cartier Bridge. And then that person moved on and, oh my gosh, it's so important for us to at least meet and bead together at a table. It's a little complicated when everybody is beading at home, and it's good to have coffee, have some snacks, talk, listen to music, have a good time. Yeah so, I think, when we were all working at home was a big hard part of it, but now, following the safety protocols of the government and wearing a mask and all that stuff, and being able to come in and work together is super important.
Yes, It seems like it's so important for your art practice. I could just imagine that, even if you're working collaboratively on one project and it's a big project, and there are different people in different parts of the world, at some point you need to be in the same space, right?
Oh yeah, well I did do a project with the Phi Foundation, that's in the old port of Montreal, and I did that last fall, and I had 25 participants from all over the country work on these small little swatches. And there were six months where I was just in my house with all these projects everywhere…we started, weaving them together, and then we made this collaborative project.
Amazing! Now what about materials Nico? People talk about the fact that things take longer or it's hard to get materials, in terms of supply chains. Have you had any kind of issue with that, with your work?
Oh yes, and it has impacted certain colours going into projects, if we can't get that bead, because before the pandemic I'd be like "Okay, I need color 80928," and then they would make that batch because if we're working on a large project, we need to get a large order of supplies, or in a factory in Japan and then they are shipped to Canada. So that started to sort of simmer down, and I was like "Okay, so now we're just going to work with the materials that we have in Canada," at bead supply stores, going to the warehouses buying all their stock.
You are the one that's been buying all the stock!
Ha ha! Because of the pandemic, supplies were sort of running short I had two bags of beads in my studio and it was this white and this blue and I looked at this J Cloth that was hanging out in my kitchen and I was like "Okay we're going to bead the J Cloth," and that was another project that really was able to relate with people.
That's really cool, yeah I saw that. I saw that on your website it's beautiful, it's really, really beautiful.
I've heard of the pandemic called the Great Panini or the Great Pause. What do you think, I mean it sounds like for you it's changed, maybe not for the future necessarily, but you've definitely made some changes to respond to the pandemic?
It will be interesting, in the next couple of years to see how things are changing and how artists are relating with each other and with their art practices because this is kind of at the, I don't want to say that it's at the beginning, because hopefully there will be a time in the future, when we won't have the pandemic, but maybe it'll go on for the next two or three years, we don't really know, do we, in some form right?
Yeah I think there's going to definitely be a change in the way art is made, or interacted with behind the scenes now. I think there's going to be this hybrid sort of collaborative project-like process within it.
I think there will be a lot of online sessions with more confidence with people doing projects like this, and even right now I'm doing a collaborative project with UBC, the University of British Columbia, and we have 75 participants again and it's people all over Canada. And you know just doing this weird sort of collaborative way of learning and working with materials and seeing what could become of it in person in May, if that's a possibility, but if not we'll see. We just don't know where we're going to be going, yeah and artists are able to sort of adapt to their situations, so I think that this is going to be fine.
Yeah, artists are so resilient. I mean you have to be, you have no choice, right? But that's actually helpful for the rest of us who aren't artists. I feel like art helps people with their resilience; it helps them with their strength. Especially in these times it's so important.
Okay, so I just wanted to ask you one thing about when you started beading because I read on your website that you started beading in 2014 and that you fell in love with beads and the vibrant colours and you talked about the fact that it was also a commentary to the government and museum public collections, that were interested in collecting Indigenous art objects, but they weren't interested in hearing the voices behind those objects. Can you speak a little bit to that?
This was the very first beadwork object (holds up his work) and it's a ball gag and it was beaded in 2014 and again it was just falling in love with the material, like the vibrancy of the beads, the colour. And sort of experimenting with things and trying to figure out how to make it into this sculpture, so I had it on a pair of antlers and it was just, I felt like during that period, there was a lot of collecting Indigenous art, but we didn't really get to hear the voices behind the artists. I think it started in the 70s when a little bit of media attention went to it, but it's still we're losing, we have lost a lot of information, about 100 years even because we need to find out what these artists were saying or really wanted to talk about in their work, and in my research right now I'm looking at older beadworks from the 1800s. I'm having a relationship with it and I'm seeing certain messages.
Even in the beadwork, they'll have syllabic written in it like sort of messages hidden when they're writing or beading it in the residential schools or whatever, so there are certain things are plants that they're putting there as messages. So I think the cool thing about even that resilience that was going on in older beadwork, like even the vines (they) would have certain letters that would point out and write messages.
I think yeah listening to the voices is really important. I had done this object, because Indigenous art, it's very beautiful, it's meticulous, it's precise, it's just like perfect. So yeah, that's what I was trying to say with this work was that people should be listening to what the artists have to say, just the beauty of it all.
Yeah, so not just the surface. Yes, it's beautiful, but there's a whole, their messages here, there's a dialogue, there's history, there's…yeah everything.
Oh yeah, or it's everyday life. It's how all artists were always documenting what experiences that (they) were working with, or all artists just have this response to the environment that they'd put in, or the objects they're surrounded by, or the other politics of it all too. So there's always that connection to it, yeah.
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Art Beyond Borders brings together six artists working in pairs (three duos) in a virtual space on a common project for three months as they create synergies, share knowledge, and techniques. The artists are working remotely, using digital technologies to meet, exchange, and develop their work that spans painting, sculpture, ceramics, textile arts, dance, theatre, music, digital art, writing, etc. The project sprung from the forced virtual context that artists locally and globally have been faced with since the COVID-19 pandemic began.
To learn more about Nico Williams ᐅᑌᒥᐣ or about other participating artists, visit our Programming page. To watch the complete virtual studio visit, view our YouTube channel.
We’d like to thank MRC des Collines-de-l’Outaouais for their support for this project.