Shelley Niro’s Artistic Practice Captured in a Short Film by David Hartman 

Now on view in Early Days, Shelley Niro’s mixed-media sculpture Erratic Love offers a vivid entry point into the artist’s expansive and deeply personal practice. A Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) artist, filmmaker, and storyteller from Six Nations of the Grand River Territory, Niro works across photography, painting, sculpture, and film, drawing on Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy histories, matriarchy, and a profound connection to the natural world. Throughout her practice, personal experience and collective memory are woven together with wit, warmth, and an enduring sense of care. 

Erratic Love takes its title from the poem « An Erratic Song » by the late playwright and poet Daniel David Moses—who, like Niro, came from Six Nations of the Grand River Territory. The sculpture is composed of two interconnected elements: a substantial heart-shaped river stone resting on a red velvet pillow adorned with beadwork, and a reproduction of Moses’s poem set in a beaded frame. Both are displayed atop matching iron pedestals positioned side by side. 

As the visual artist and curator Emma Hassencahl-Perley writes in her essay for Early Days, Niro « uses beads to frame her work within the context of Iroquoian women’s cultural production and daily life. » The red velvet pillow references the beaded pincushions that Iroquoian women sold as souvenir art at tourist destinations throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. On the subject of this visual language, Niro explains: « I wanted to reflect Iroquoian beadwork. There are designs that people recognize immediately as being Iroquoian. I was always conscious of making those signs in my work. » 

The heart-shaped river stone—marked by a blueberry-stained handprint left by the artist—was discovered by Niro on a walk along the Ose’kowákhe (Grand River), smoothed by water after what the poem describes as « aeons underground. » Niro has long been drawn to rocks and the stories they carry, and it was this particular stone that moved her to approach Moses about writing a corresponding poem. 

In « An Erratic Song, » Moses imagines the rock as a living presence, birthed by love and carried through an odyssey of encounters with gravity and the river—living underground before surfacing for air. The term « erratic » carries layered meaning within the work: while it evokes unpredictability and movement, it is also a geological term describing a rock displaced from its place of origin by glacial activity. In this context, the stone becomes a meditation on movement, memory, endurance, and belonging. 

The iron plinths supporting the sculpture and poem further extend these themes. Their lean metal frames recall the structures of skyscrapers and serve as a tribute to the early twentieth-century Kanien’kehá:ka ironworkers whose skilled and daring labour helped shape the skylines of North American cities. 

Erratic Love also served as a starting point for a wider exploration of Niro’s creative world in the McMichael’s 2021 documentary by David Hartman. Tracing the ideas and influences that animate her practice, the film offers an intimate portrait of an artist whose work moves fluidly between satire and tenderness, confronting the enduring impacts of colonialism with humour, resilience, and care—always grounded in an abiding spirit of optimism. 

Produced as part of the McMichael’s ongoing film series spotlighting leading contemporary Canadian artists, the documentary illuminates the depth and generosity that have defined Niro’s practice for more than four decades. 

We are proud to share this film and to celebrate Niro’s remarkable work in the McMichael’s collection. We are grateful to the Koerner Foundation for their generous support of this film series, which helps bring the stories and practices of leading Canadian artists to audiences across Canada and beyond.