‘first the language of making’: Tiffany Boyle in Conversation with Nadia Myre

Nadia Myre is an Algonquin and Québécois artist and a member of the Kitigan Zibi Anishinaabeg First Nation. Over the past two decades, Myre has developed a body of work widely recognised for its sustained engagement with questions of Indigenous identity, memory, language and the ongoing impacts of colonial histories. Working across sculpture, installation, textiles, video and participatory processes, the artist often draws upon material traditions such as beadwork and weaving while simultaneously expanding their conceptual and formal possibilities within contemporary art. Based in Montreal, Myre is a professor in the Department of Studio Arts at Concordia University, where her pedagogical and collaborative projects extend her artistic concerns into collective and intergenerational spaces.

A recurring aspect of Myre’s practice is the transformation of culturally and politically charged materials, symbols and documents. Through labour-intensive processes – including hand beading, weaving, casting and mark-making – the artist reworks archival texts, historical imagery and everyday objects to reveal the layered narratives embedded within them. Her projects frequently explore themes of relationality, collective memory, healing and resilience while also addressing the tensions between personal history and broader structures of governance, nationhood and land. Language also plays an important role in the artist’s work, whether through the use of Indigenous material practices as forms of visual communication or through the re-inscription of written texts and symbolic systems.

Taking past collaborations as a point of departure, Myre and Tiffany Boyle discuss the role that language and embodied knowledge continue to play in the artist’s work. As part of Glasgow International in 2018 they worked on the exhibition Code-Switching and Other Work, held in the Briggait, a former fish market at the edge of Glasgow’s Merchant City. Responding to the history of clay tobacco pipe production in Glasgow, the exhibition brought together works spanning photography, sculpture, sound and performance.1 Myre and Boyle subsequently collaborated in 2022 on a new body of work co-commissioned by Edinburgh Art Festival and Edinburgh Printmakers, marking the 200th anniversary of Edinburgh’s Union Canal and a return to printmaking in the artist’s production.2

Tiffany Boyle: I want to begin our conversation by discussing two particular works in which I think a kind of searching is very present, in both formal archives and collections in a museum or institution, and archives outside of those, existing by other means. I have been thinking about how we search for something that hasn’t been formally recorded or exists in a way that museums don’t understand how to handle, or I could say searching in the face of absence perhaps. The first of these works is Acts that Fade Away 2016 (fig.1), presented at the McCord Stewart Museum, Montreal, and the second is Code Switching (fig.2), a photographic series from 2017.3 In Acts that Fade Away, you specifically sought to recreate objects without giving yourself sight of the intended finished result, equally withholding the prompts you were following from the audience, which I have always found a very poetic intervention. Then with Code Switching, you were in London on a residency, walking along the Thames at low tide, and came across bead-like fragments in the river mud, a kind of public archaeological excavation. These beads, or casts of them, have made themselves present in a number of works. Could you discuss the journey that finding these fragments began for you?

Nadia Myre: They’re definitely connected, as you suggest, and in a way that is fundamental to my practice. What links Acts that Fade Away and Code Switching – and much of my work – is the act of searching. For me, searching is a way of asking, ‘how do we know things?’, and ‘how do we come to know what we don’t know?’ As artists, there are moments of recognition when a work suddenly feels on the right path, or when information returns to us in a way that validates what we are testing or thinking through.

One of my first experiences of working in this way – of searching through making – came much earlier, with Grandmothers’ Circle 2002 (fig.3). At the time, I didn’t know why I was drawn to making wishbone-like wooden structures and arranging them in a triangular formation that I nevertheless called a circle. I was making without knowing. Only later did I come to understand the work as a meditation on community knowledge – how it circulates, and how, in my own experience of being outside a community, I was still seeking access to it.

What has become clear to me over time is that confirmation often arrives afterwards. A few years after I made the work, I encountered the same forms in a photograph in the archive: racks for smoking fish, for drying meat, for hanging pelts. Shapes that I thought emerged from intuition alone turn out to be objects my ancestors would have made, used, transported, remade and repurposed. This is where the archive becomes vital: not as a source I consciously draw from, but as a place where my work and ancestral knowledge intersect retroactively. I believe the work of the artist – for me at least – is concerned with tapping into something outside of and bigger than myself. Through my making, I can find ways to tap into knowledge without having had the community support around it.

One of the things that was important during the development of the retrospective at the National Gallery of Canada [NGC] was language, specifically material language.4 In terms of my family history, my mother was separated from her community, in a dark period of Canadian history following the residential school system, referred to as the Sixties Scoop, in which children from First Nations communities were adopted or placed into foster care, largely with white Canadian families. My entry point into understanding what it means to be Indigenous without having grown up on a reserve, without having the language, without having the family or community base, was to learn and re-learn a material practice.

In the catalogue for the retrospective, the people whom I thank first are my parents and then Pinock (Daniel Smith), who has been a great teacher to me – of traditional Indigenous ways of making things – for example teaching me how to craft a birchbark canoe. This canoe became an early work of mine, titled History in Two Parts 2000 (fig.4). It was significant for me to credit this teaching in the retrospective, and also for History in Two Parts to return home for the first time, loaned from the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, Indianapolis, to be displayed at the NGC.

In spring 2015 I was invited as an artist-in-residence at the McCord Stewart Museum, Montreal. At that time I was consciously trying to push back against being pigeonholed as a Native artist who was expected to produce ‘Indian art’ and make beadwork. The McCord has a rich collection of early Canadiana, materials relating to Montreal’s history and a substantial Indigenous collection. I found myself repeatedly sketching ideas for a work and then searching the collection for objects that might support those ideas. Each time, I came up empty-handed. This process made me realise that curators are essential as the first point of entry into collections – they know their contours intimately.

I was working mainly with Guislaine Lemay, Curator of Material Culture, and Céline Widmer, Curator of History and Archives, and through our discussions they mentioned a series of Victorian-era women’s magazines. These magazines – such as Godey’s Lady’s Book – contained recipes, songs and craft instructions, many of which referenced Indigenous techniques. This discovery sparked my interest in attempting to recreate objects from the magazines, which were already reinterpretations of Indigenous craft. It became a way of asking how ‘Nativeness’ is defined, and whether it could be tested – whether certain knowledge might somehow exist ‘in the blood’.

My exhibition Decolonial Gestures or Doing it Wrong? Refaire le chemin 2016 (figs.5 and 6) emerged as a playful way to work through these questions. I asked the curators to compare the magazine instructions with related objects in the collection and then to give me only the verbal instructions, withholding any language and visual references that would clue me in to what I was making. I wanted to test myself by working in abstraction, without context. At one point, I even had to learn how to crochet in order to decipher the pattern. The process was awkward, even comical: when I went to buy materials and asked for silk cord, shopkeepers asked me what I was making, to know what kind of silk cord I needed, or how much – and I had none of those answers.

In the end I produced four objects and recorded hundreds of hours of footage documenting the making process. Those recordings became Acts that Fade Away 2016 (fig.7), which captures the many moments where my hands hesitate, where nothing seems to happen, and where I try to decode the instructions. When I later brought the objects back to the curators, we identified one of them as a ‘whimsy’ (a fanciful Victorian-era object). Learning this afterwards was revealing, as was discovering that magazines like Godey’s were also used by some Indigenous women, who adapted their crafts to meet settler tastes. This complicates the narrative: rather than a one-way exchange of power, there was a dynamic trade shaped by adaptation and market demand – something borne out in the archive.

Code Switching began during a residency in London. Walking along the Thames at low tide, I noticed small ceramic fragments in the river mud that looked like beads (fig.8). I picked them up because they felt familiar, even though I didn’t yet know what they were. Someone mudlarking nearby told me they were fragments of clay tobacco pipes. I collected a small box of them and brought them back to my studio in Montreal, where they sat on a shelf for some time before I began working with them.

Eventually I arranged the fragments on a bead loom, simply using them as beads, and scanned the composition to produce the photographic series. As I worked, the structure began to resemble a breastplate, and I started to think about how the fragments were moving between different cultural and historical references. They read at once as remnants of colonial tobacco pipes and as forms resembling beadwork structures. That movement between meanings – across materials, histories and visual languages – is what led me to title the work Code Switching.

Tiffany Boyle: You’ve used the fragments of the clay pipes directly in your work since around 2016, and also cast from them, using these subsequently in your photography, sculpture and installation (fig.9). In some of your more recent works, for example as part of your 2024 solo exhibition at Centre International d’Art et du Paysage (CIAPV) on Vassivière Island, it feels that you’ve been playing with and contorting these forms: through colour as one example, or through their shapes.5 There is a real lexicon which has emerged, which became words on the wall in the exhibition Ropes and Lines at CIAPV, in the artwork Your Waves of Want Wash Over Us 2024 (figs.10 and 11). In previous conversations you have referenced wampum, which are woven records used to communicate treaties and historical events. What’s the relationship for you between wampum and your more recent ceramic-based installations?

Nadia Myre: For me the connection has to do with language – first the language of making, the material language. The fragments from the clay pipes gradually began to evolve into a kind of visual vocabulary in my work. More recently I’ve been extruding clay and forming the pieces into words written in Gregg shorthand, installing them on the wall. Gregg is a stenographic system developed in the late nineteenth century that records the sounds of speech through fluid marks rather than conventional spelling. What interests me about it is that it has largely become unreadable. When encountered today it often registers first as form – lines and rhythms on a page – before it is understood as language.

That condition resonates for me with wampum. Wampum belts are not simply decorative beadwork; they hold agreements, histories and relationships. But their meanings are not contained only in the object – they are carried through people who know how to recount and transmit that knowledge. When this chain of transmission is interrupted, the object remains but the meaning it carries becomes difficult to decipher. There is an abstraction to the language of the belts, and I feel something similar when encountering stenographic systems today. As fewer people know how to read them, the marks begin to operate visually before they operate linguistically.

In the ceramic works I’m interested in that tension between language and abstraction. The forms are words, but they are not immediately legible. Some of this thinking also comes from being in archives – for example, at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, where I saw a wampum belt displayed with an interpretive panel that I found myself distrusting. What language do we have now to understand what a specific wampum is communicating after so many layers of interpretation? In Your Waves of Want Wash Over Us, this tension becomes explicit. The extruded words repeat the phrase ‘All we want is your trinket, fur, women, land, oil, water’. The language accumulates across the wall, pointing to the ways desire, exchange and extraction have been articulated through written systems that appear clear but carry other histories beneath them – histories that continue to shape the realities of resource extraction, even today.

Tiffany Boyle: I do feel like something that you frequently embark on is to acquire a particular skill for a project: if you want to make something – for example a toile de Jouy wallpaper (fig.12) – you will teach yourself about the printing method, colourways, the details of the repeat pattern and then make it. It could be crochet, it could be beadwork, but you will seek out the skills you need to learn and make. It seems to run concurrently with your formal artistic training – do you have a sense of where this impulse stems from?

Nadia Myre: First and foremost, it comes from being excited about learning. I’ve always wanted to understand how things work and how things are made. If I know how something is constructed, it gives me more freedom to play with it – to move between different materials and techniques. And I would return to your first question about searching. Curiosity – wanting to understand something by trying to make it – is very much the starting place for my practice. The first wallpaper I produced, Contact in Monochrome (Toile de Jouy) 2018 (fig.13), was for the exhibition we worked on together as part of Glasgow International.6 I followed an online tutorial so I could better understand how to repeat the motifs properly. The wallpaper departs from the pastoral scenes traditionally associated with toile de Jouy, instead tracing the story of tobacco – from Indigenous relationships with the plant and its pollinators, to its transformation into a colonial commodity. The repeated imagery connects tobacco’s ceremonial and ecological origins to the wealth accumulated by Scottish ‘tobacco lords’, whose fortunes shaped the civic architecture of Glasgow’s Merchant City, where the exhibition took place.

Tiffany Boyle: You often utilise ways of making associated with craft within your artistic practice, in a way that pushes against the hierarchies or boundaries often placed between craft, design and visual art. I wondered where this stems from, and how this has created space within past projects you’ve produced with a participatory nature?

Nadia Myre: I’ve never thought about my making as craft, those distinctions are driven by economies that were not a part of my thinking. I was learning how to make a rattle – is that a craft? What’s the difference between making a rattle in my home territory or somewhere else, like Martinique? My preoccupation is with the making of the object itself. One of my favourite artists whose work I often think about is Ron Noganosh (1949–2017). Within his practice in sculpture and assemblage, he often created drums, rattles and shields, substituting particular raw materials depending on what was immediately to hand. To me, this was always so much a part of the culture, to work with what we have around us, and that’s how I approach art, making within the means of what is around me. As we were discussing earlier, it then becomes ‘what do the hands know, what are they doing, how do they hold memory, is there a space for remembering-while-making or unlearning-while-making?’

Journey of the Seventh Fire 2008–9 (fig.14) is a series in which I recreated the logos of major mining and hydroelectric companies, such as Alcan, CAMECO, and Hydro-Québec, through hand beaded work. The project reflects on the Anishinaabe teaching of the Seventh Fire as a moment of choice, questioning how contemporary relationships to land, extraction and Indigenous communities might move toward another way of co-existing. Because the beadwork was extensive, the works were produced with the help of many hands, introducing participation and shared labour into the making. Another work that shaped how I think about participation is Indian Act 2000–3 (fig.15), in which I reproduced the entire text of the Canadian Indian Act by hand beading each page. Every printed word was covered with red and white beads, so the text slowly transformed into a field of beadwork. The work became participatory because I invited others to bead the pages with me. People would sit down and bead a section, often reading the text as they worked. It created space for conversation – about the law itself, about identity, about how something written on paper can shape lives for generations. In the end, the piece carries many hands within it, and that collective labour became an important part of the meaning of the work.

Tiffany Boyle: In 2022 we worked together for the second time, realising the project Tell Me of Your Boats and Your Waters – Where Do They Come From, Where Do They Go?, commissioned by Edinburgh Printmakers as part of the 2022 Edinburgh Art Festival. In that moment of heavy production in advance of the opening, I wasn’t able to make the association between the new works you were producing and earlier works. For example, Accomplice I 2022 (fig.16) was part of a new sculptural series made with rawhide that recalled earlier projects in which skin had been heavily present, such as The Scar Project 2005–13, which foregrounded questions of forgiveness and reconciliation. But during this production period, you were also creating poetry produced as digital prints and lithographs with Master printer Alastair Clark, Head of Editions at Edinburgh Printmakers, after some time away from working with text. I think of you as a wordsmith, both with words and in a visual sense – you are able to say so much, deftly distilled into something that appears succinct, but has so many layers to peel back. What for you have been the artistic possibilities of poetry in speaking to both the personal and political in your practice?

Nadia Myre: In poetry, we put together words and concepts to twist, to mean something else, or to have layered meanings. I think we do the same in visual art. One of the things I love about poetry is the economy of means that you referred to in my practice. As an artist across all mediums, it is the research behind, and focus of, each new work and project that determines the materials I will ultimately draw on, which in my practice to date has ranged from performance, sound, sculpture, installation, textiles, ceramics, drawing, photography, video, text and social practice, media and public art. The making is often determined so much by the context and circumstances of that project – whether it is a substantial three-year production period or something more immediate.

One thing that I learned from poetry is that you don’t need to say it all in the poem. Words are free, they’re limitless, and you can be inventive: bending, shaping and shifting them to become new words. You can also go back to the old, old words, and think about how they were created. A long time ago, I did have the aspiration to be a writer, and after I finished my master’s, I went back to Concordia University onto a creative writing programme, but life and trying to make a living as an artist got in the way. It was really freeing in 2022 to revisit language as part of the work for Edinburgh Printmakers, and then to develop this further for my 2024 exhibition at CIAPV.

Tiffany Boyle: One of the works that led me to reflect on your use of text is an earlier work from 2008, titled No Please Don’t Stop (fig.17). Across rows and columns of changing formations, the title words are re-arranged in ways in which each line remains legible, yet the meaning changes completely. The text is in a beautiful blue calligraphic script, but there’s a real gut punch that this work holds.

Nadia Myre: The eye and experience of the reader is something I try to exercise through the material practice as much as through my writing. One thread that has stayed with me throughout my practice is language. Early on I worked very directly with words and short phrases, sometimes presenting them almost as statements or interruptions within the exhibition space. A work like No Please Don’t Stop, for example, holds a kind of tension within the phrase itself – it can be read as desire, as resistance, as hesitation. I’ve always been interested in that moment in which language becomes unstable, where meaning shifts depending on who is speaking or listening.

Tiffany Boyle: The location of Edinburgh Printmakers backs onto the Union Canal, and as part of the history of the canal, you uncovered that for some, journeys on the canal linked them through to Glasgow for passages onto America and Canada. Running concurrently with this local research, you sought to track down traces of your grandmother; could you tell us about the process of searching for this and what you found?

Nadia Myre: I wouldn’t say that I was searching, but I think that when you’re open to the questions of ‘who am I?’ and ‘what is my relationship to this place?’, then any enquiry has the possibility to bring you to interesting places, sometimes through chance or serendipity. In this case, the question centred on connecting my Indigeneity to Edinburgh and the site surrounding Edinburgh Printmakers, which includes the Union Canal and led me to Dorothy Marion Reid. She was a Scottish-born émigré to Canada, and the author of Tales of Nanabozho (1963), which I encountered by chance in my local library in 2022.7 Nanabozho is a prominent trickster character to the Anishinaabe, and the book gathers together twenty-one tales from Nanabozho’s life, stories I grew up on.

One of the magic moments that occurred in the development of this project was while researching Reid, I realised that she had a vinyl record pressed and published by CBC, immediately after she had won a Centennial Award, and I was able to track that record down. It felt like a magic moment because at the same time, I also found my grandmother’s record, which I only knew of through stories. I knew that she’d gone down from Canada to Tennessee: she was a banjo singer and produced a 7-inch record, with an A- and a B-side. I first played the B-side of my grandmother’s record, which is called Don’t Cry Baby, and I think the A-side is called something like 72 Hours.

Listening, I was making a connection between my grandmother recording those songs and under what conditions: on the one hand, I think that the record is about a woman stepping out on her man, but when I think about my history and my mother’s history, when I hear the song, I also hear the lyrics as being about a woman leaving her child. I was thinking of the song as a lullaby, something that she produced to circulate in the world, for me to find, as someone who always wanted to sing but could never remember the lyrics to anything. The record is a gift, a song that my grandmother gave me.

Tiffany Boyle: We haven’t yet in this conversation discussed your work in photography. At times, you work with digital photography, at other times with high-resolution digital scans, usually of something that you have made but sometimes something that you have found. There seems to be a distinction between these, they suggest different ways of looking and surveying – what has underpinned those choices for you?

Nadia Myre: Sometimes I use the scanner as a photographic lens, sometimes I shoot with a regular camera and there have been occasions in which I’ve used photography that isn’t mine. For example, in the series [in]tangible tangles 2021 (fig.18), the images of moccasins were taken directly from the collection database of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. I really appreciated how the moccasins were photographed – in other collections, one shoe may be positioned horizontally and the other vertically so that you see as much of the object through the varied angles. The Smithsonian, however, documents the shoes from above and the soles, and thus it really gave me the sense of a person’s presence (fig.19). I used the images directly from the collection: cropping them, purposefully inverting the colours, and then printing on a specific photographic paper.

When I first began scanning beadwork in 2007, I was interested in scale – how something very small could be enlarged while still reading as beadwork. I would make small, beaded matrices, almost like a printing plate, and then scan them to expand the image. What interested me about the scanner, as opposed to a camera, is the way it slowly passes light across the surface of the object. Everything sitting directly on the glass becomes incredibly sharp, while anything slightly lifted from it falls softly out of focus. The scanner also has a way of compressing the image, which allowed me to push the scale of the work while still holding onto the texture of the beads. In all of my work, the way I actively look at things is crucial. The process of making the work can shift how the object is seen, so that something familiar can be seen anew.

For my exhibition in France, I also scanned and photographed drawings I had made. Seeing how the same drawings translated through different processes – producing two very different works from the same source – was really interesting to me. Whether it is photography, scanning, printmaking, or even taking rubbings of surfaces and objects, there is a kind of magic in these processes. In each case, the hand recedes a little and you lose full control over the final outcome. With the scanner, once the lid is closed and the process begins, the image unfolds on its own. Printmaking has a similar quality: when you lift the paper from the plate, there is always a moment of surprise, almost like alchemy. These methods require precision, but I value the space they leave for transformation and chance.