“ The heart that breaks open can contain the whole universe.” 
- Joanna Macy

 

 

I have had a  passionate and abiding bond with nature and the plant world. I am happiest and most comfortable when living in close relationship with flora. Plant life and living processes are both the subject and the fertile exploratory terrain in my creative process.

Ceramics, printmaking and cyanotype, a photographic printing process,  are simultaneously part of my formal exploration. I mostly work in a serial manner. To make the ceramics elements,  I am using a paperclay soaking technique where I add paper fibre to liquid clay in order to dip various collected plant forms. In the firing process, the plant material and the paper fibres burn, leaving three-dimensional imprints or seemingly petrified forms. I organize these elements in in space within an installation format.

I have been studying,  cultivating and using medicinal plants as a dilettante for the wellbeing of my family. This has  led me to borrow herbalism’s savoir-faire to create tinctures, macerations, amulets, pot-pourris and sedative pillows which I also integrate in my installations.

I have also been using collagraphy, a printmaking technique for several years now. My collaboration with Jacinthe Tétrault at Atelier Circulaire was instrumental in realizing the potential of this technique while using vegetal matter. I collage plant material, akin to herbarium sheets,  to make the matrices for the prints.

More recently, I have been introduced to the cyanotype method by Lorene Williams, a Montreal photographer. I have since discovered the fascinating work of Anna Atkins (1799-1871), a British photographer, trained as a botanist, who explored the cyanotype.

I am using this old monochrome photographic method that gives a cyan-blue print. It enables me to work very spontaneously with plants collected on the spot thus introducing an exciting alternative to the long and meticulous technique of collagraphy.

Over the years, I have been developing an ecological awareness and sensitivity and a renewed interest in the interconnectedness of all things. I am driven by the realization that the true ecological Self is only possible as part of an holistic view of the world. In my life and in my art work I want to mingle my passion for flora, yoga and Buddhist philosophies which are all contributing to my journey towards the Self.

Spending time with the plant world is spiritually satisfying. It contributes in bringing my inner and outer life more closely together. It has being deepening and widening my emotional and visceral experience of that interconnectedness which in turns deepens and widens my sense of Self.

When I bring the leafy “material” into my work , I see it anew. I identify with it. Plant material goes way beyond the formal level; it directly refers to life and potentially provides me with a kind of mirror to myself. I have a curiosity for both  indigenous and introduced self-propagating flora from my immediate environment and unfamiliar and exotic plants I meet during my travels.

I am equally fascinated by the physical, chemical, biological and supersensible qualities of plants. I am particularly interested in the  undisciplined self-willed existence and prolific propagation of wild plants. Wild flora epitomizes our complex and intricate relationship, not only to plant life,  but to all other life forms. I like to think that self-propagating plants have the potential to symbolize the false nature/culture dichotomy Westeners have created and nourished: the deceptive belief that nature is separated and inferior to human culture. In fact, human history and natural history, are mutually inclusive disciplines; nature and culture constantly interweave and mingle, they are not separated.

In my work, through perceptual experience developing from the awe-inspiring secret life of plants, I want to create an intuitive symbolism with an iconic resonance. I want to create images imbued with new feelings, alternative patterns of thought and creative representations of nature. I want to revive a feeling of gratitude for the gift of life, of reverence and enchantment towards the amazing diversity, ingeniosity and creativity of the plant kingdom. For me,  creating botanical images is an invitation to contemplation, rootedness and a way of reinventing images of the anima mundi.