Moss Bag Triptych (detail)
Daphne Boyer (Metis)
2021
Photograph: Moss Bag H4-2-13, Manitoba Museum
Photo Credit: Vincent Designs, Winnipeg
Video: Tribute to an Unknown Artist, Michelle Smith
Moss Bag Digital Collage: Photographs of individual berries Pigmented ink on Canson High Gloss Archival paper,
acrylic face-mount on Dibond
On loan from the artist

I am a plant scientist and visual artist of M tis descent. I created Moss Bag Triptych to showcase an original moss bag – an exquisite example of M tis beadwork made by an unknown beader in the late 1800s – and to celebrate my Red River ancestry.
I fell in love with the original moss bag baby carrier H4-2-13 during a research trip to the Manitoba Museum, where Curator of Ethnology Maureen Matthews uses it to teach beading. I immediately wanted to know the artist’s story – who she was, where she lived, what other works she had made – and to create a large-scale, contemporary work, using my novel ‘Berries to Beads’ technique, that would connect with my own story. The work you see here is made up of individually photographed berries that were ‘beaded’ using my digital tool box.
To get a better idea of how the original work became my teacher, I invite you to view the accompanying video – an integral part of the Moss Bag Triptych – made in collaboration with M tis filmmaker Michelle Smith.