Nadia Aït - Saïd is a native of the Gaspé Peninsula.  She divides her time between the sea in Gaspésie, the Montreal urban setting and frequent trips abroad.  For over twenty years, in parallel with her artistic practice, she has been deepenning her understanding of the applied Eastern philosophies as living wisdoms, especially those of the Tibetan tradition. Thus, the two paths intertwine flexibly, interacting and feeding each other in the same territory of interiority.

Openness, silence and presence are at the heart of her approach.  All her research tends towards an understanding of the notion of identity in connection with impermanence. Origin is the title she gave to all of her artistic work.  The texture - material always present in her work metaphorically illustrates this notion of essence that she attempts to identify. Consisting of pleated paper, pasted and dyed, it gives her work a timelessness that gracefully combines rough accents and modernity.

Attached to this texture - material are various altered materials, some picked, some received as offerings : Tibetan flags aged by weather, clay, incense ash, driftwood, rusted metal, pieces of fabric already worn, scraps of writing, etc.  The artist molds, assembles, sews, pleats and scribes, magnifying the finds that become, in a minimalist setting, invitation to dispossession and introspection. Her production consists of mixed-media artworks and immersive installations. More recently, she has begun exploring performance and video, which have opened other avenues. Driven by a great desire to share, she also encourages the community to collaborate regularly in the work in progress.

This corpus of works has been presented in different locations: artists centres, cultural centres, museums, galleries and embassies in Canada, the United States, in France, Belgium, Algeria and in Japan. Her works are part of private collections in Quebec and in Europe and of public collections such as Loto-Quebec in Montréal.