INTERVIEW Amanda May Daly
PHOTOGRAPHY & FASHION David K Shields
Ed Archie NoiseCat is a contemporary sculptor, carver and jewellery designer rooted in Salish tradition, who comes from Canim Lake reserve in British Columbia, with ancestral connections to the Lil’wat and Semahquam First Nations. There are people whose presence you feel before they speak, and Ed is without question, one of those.
RORY WILLIAM DOCHERTY shirt & jacket. JASON NATHAN earrings. Ed’s own hat.
He rode horses no one else could handle, played drums in a Rockabilly band called the Redcats at Vancouver’s Smiling Buddha Cabaret, trained as a printmaker at Emily Carr, absorbed the influence of Bill Reid and Beau Dick and Robert Davidson, and eventually found his way to Tyler Graphics in New York. He took the long way round to everything. He’ll tell you himself it was mostly a slog.
PRODUCTS OF MY ENVIRONMENT X THE SON OF PICASSO shirt, jacket and jeans. JASON NATHAN pounamu & earrings. Ed’s own hat.
And then his son Julian Brave NoiseCat – with co-director Emily Kassie – made Sugarcane: a documentary that put Ed at its centre, and at the 97th Academy Awards became the first film by an Indigenous director to receive an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary.
Ed showed up to the ceremony in a tuxedo made by Zahir at The Sartorial Shop, a custom salmon-motif cummerbund by Himikalas Pam Baker echoing a silver bracelet of his own making, and waist-long salt-and-pepper hair in a thick braid. He had, by all accounts, the full Hollywood presence – the rizz, the swagger – that only comes from having actually lived something
Amanda May Daly dressing Ed Archie NoiseCat for the Oscars. Photo: Taralyn Sanderson
It was Amanda May Daly, Ojibwe stylist and long-time collaborator, who pulled that look together. When Sugarcane came to Māoriland, she reached out to It’s Interval – and through a chain of connections that included Kiri Nathan’s garments and photographer David K. Shields, we found ourselves on a West Coast beach with Ed and Julian, wind up, waves crashing, getting shots that made everyone stop and say “holy fuck, look at that”. It was raining and blowing hard on the black sand beach at Muriwai. Ed walked straight to the edge anyway, where the waves were spraying up off the rocks. That’s more or less how he’s lived his life.
RORY WILLIAM DOCHERTY suit. Ed’s own hat.
In their conversation, Amanda and Ed move through art school and rodeo injuries, the discipline of a blade finish on carved work, the feast-or-famine reality of life as an artist, and eleven years of sobriety that Ed describes simply as the best thing he ever did. He talks about his salmon bracelet – a piece that charts his own journey from Canim Lake to New York – and about what it meant to wear it to the Oscars. He talks about his dad’s horses, his wolf mask in alder, the glass dragonfly on a red cedar pole in his studio. He talks about believing in yourself when the path is brutal, and about arriving, eventually, at a life that sometimes feels almost too good to be real.
Ed Archie Noisecat is a sculptor, carver and jewellery designer based in British Columbia. Sugarcane is available now. Read the full interview below – and Part One, with Julian Brave NoiseCat, here.
Julian wears: KIRI NATHAN vest & kākahu. JASON NATHAN pounamu & earrings.
Ed wears: KIRI NATHAN vest & kākahu.
RORY WILLIAM DOCHERTY shirt. JASON NATHAN pounamu & earrings.
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