Edinburgh Art Festival and Edinburgh Printmakers present newly commissioned work from Montreal-based artist Nadia Myre responding to the 200th anniversary of the Union Canal.
The project – across print, installation and sound – explores reference points spanning Scotland and Canada, migratory routes started on the canal, indigenous story-telling, archival research methods, pattern, prose and song. The artist’s research began with the encounter of Tales Of Nanabozho in a local library in Montreal – a book published in 1964 by Scottish-born émigré Dorothy Marion Reid after moving to Canada, who recounts stories of Nanabozho, a prominent trickster character to the Anishinaabe*, provoking questions of authorship and voice reverberating into the present. As an Algonquin member of the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg First Nation, Myre’s work sited alongside the canal and in Gallery 2 at Edinburgh Printmakers brings to the fore the decolonial impulse inherent in the artist’s practice, imprinting and entangling materials with meaning.
EVENT: Artist’s talk | Tuesday 2 August | 6.30 – 7.30pm | FREE
*The Anishinaabeg (adjectival: Anishinaabe) are a group of culturally related indigenous peoples present in the region of Canada and the United States. They include the Ojibwe (including Saulteaux and Oji-Cree), Odawa, Potawatomi, Mississaugas, Nipissing and Algonquin peoples. See further information on Wikipedia.
Supported by the PLACE Programme, a partnership between Edinburgh Festivals, The Scottish Government, the City of Edinburgh Council and Creative Scotland.
Digital image of ED/7623. © Courtesy of HES (Francis M Chrystal Collection).
