Placette Desjardins, 27 rue Ambroise-Fafard
August 7 to 10, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
_Perlage collectif Nico Williams will make Placette Desjardins his workshop for a week during the Symposium. Accompanied by collaborators, he'll be sharing and creating beadwork.
_Biography Nico Williams is a member of Aamjiwnaang First Nation. He has a multidisciplinary, often collaborative practice that is centered around sculptural beadwork. He is the winner of the 2024 Sobey Art Award, Canada’s preeminent fine arts award. In 2021, he was awarded the prestigious Claudine and Stephen Bronfman Fellowship in Contemporary Art. He has recently exhibited at Bingo, Fondation PHI pour l’art contemporain (2025); Radical Stitch, the National Gallery of Canada (2024); Young Elder, James Fuentes (2023); and took part in the recent group exhibition, Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969, at the Hessel Museum of Art (2023).
_Approach Using the bright, tactile materiality and relational nature of beadwork, his practice explores the ways we live through connections with objects, place, and language. Often working in collaboration and community with others, he creates sculptures that are sometimes highly patterned abstract geometric forms, sometimes sparkling representations of familiar objects, and always hand-woven from hundreds of glass beads. In their making, these sculptures become points of relation between the multiple hands that wove them, as well as the cultural lenses through which different audiences access them.
He chooses to work with forms and objects that, like beadwork, have an overt—if often overlooked—relationship to gratitude, exchange and commerce, land, and the shaping and morphing ability of language. Sculptural geometries become a meeting point for technologies, stories, and lineages of knowledge. Translating everyday, accessible objects into beadwork re-presents regular things from daily life, inviting a reattunement to their attraction and to their code-switching, overlapping, shifting resonances across cultural contexts and modes of identity. This deep layering of held meaning—about the connectivity of past and present, cross-cultural interweaving, and both the harshness and beauty of our current reality—shapes and motivates his practice.
