Fil conducteur

The FOFA Gallery is pleased to present Fil conducteur, an exhibition of contemporary Indigenous beadwork by artists Carrie Allison, Katherine Boyer, Bev Koski, Jean Marshall, and Nico Williams. In French, the term fil conducteur literally means ‘conducting wire,’ as in the kind of wire used to transmit an electrical charge. In a more poetic or metaphorical sense, it can also connote a narrative throughline, a principal theme, a guiding idea, or connective thread. For this exhibition, the title is used to invoke the multiple connections that run between the selected artists, as well as the embodied energy contained in each bead, thread, and stitch. Spanning locations, stories, techniques, and approaches, the artists gathered here represent a cross-section of contemporary beadwork practice, as well as the networks of learning and hosting that have brought their practices together.

For Nico Williams, this exhibition marks the culmination of the Claudine and Steven Bronfman Award (which he received in 2021), and an opportunity to invite other artists who have influenced his work, exhibited alongside him, or been in dialogue with his own practice over the years. In planning the exhibition, Williams expressed how he has often been invited by other beaders to exhibitions and symposia across Turtle Island, but rarely had the chance to invite other artists to Tiohtià:ke/Montréal, where he is based. This gesture of reciprocity and collective exchange reflects what curator and scholar Franchesca Hebert-Spence (who will contribute a text to the forthcoming catalogue) describes as “hosting epistemologies,” and speaks to forms of gathering and organizing that enact “embodied knowledge and resistance.”(1)

Williams is known for his hyper-realistic beaded renderings of geometric forms and everyday objects, focusing on commodities and materials that speak to contemporary Indigenous experience across urban, domestic, and rural spaces. At FOFA, his beaded works are presented alongside an array of source material, including actual bingo cards, scratch tickets, and printed matter – sharing a crucial aspect of his research and practice not often seen alongside completed works. Williams’ attention to everyday objects and materials offers another throughline for considering the works included in Fil conducteur. For Carrie Allison, the ubiquitous suburban green lawn becomes a means to interrogate colonial land use, notions of private property, and destructive monocultures, explored through a series of beaded replicas of different species of grass. An interest in boundaries, (self) protection and defense mechanisms is also present in Bev Koski’s newly created suite of works Ongoing Defenses, which continues her practice of beaded coverings or replicas of found objects – in this case, spikes and barbed wire, alongside forms that resemble dust, spines, or crawling bugs. Jean Marshall’s Reciprocity brings together a selection of functional objects made in tribute to those who have supported her; they will return to everyday use once the exhibition closes. Her beaded and felted tondos show vibrant depictions of plants, and incorporate leather made from tanned moose hide, a practice she has been learning for the last 7 years. Finally, Katherine Boyer’s distinct combinations of suspended straps, wooden boards, and beaded images of clouds and sky, capture moments of presence in places that connect her to family, while also speaking to processes of world-building and infrastructures of support. Like Marshall, she also includes functional objects that evoke the user or wearer. As much as all of these works are intrinsically connected to traditional Indigenous knowledge systems, they are also tied to everyday experiences and contemporary concerns. As the curators of the groundbreaking exhibition Radical Stitch have described, “Bead artists are not on the margins, they’re embedded deeply at the centre, in the everyday, reacting and recontextualizing pop culture and current realities...whether it’s a call to action or resistant laughter.”(2)

The slow and meticulous practice of sorting different sizes and colours, of carefully stringing a bead onto a thread, of repeatedly adding stitches to create a shape or pattern, together form a vocabulary of specific gestures that are at the core of each of these works, a line of energy that runs through these distinct practices. These gestures are also echoed in Allison’s video work Our Hands, Our Body, Our Spirit and in Williams’ growing archive of used bingo cards, where accumulated labour and time are made evident through repeated processes of marking or placing: bingo call by bingo call, rock by rock, thread by thread, bead by bead.

-Nicole Burisch