biography
Francine Potvin is a visual artist, a teacher, a plant aficionado, an avid gardener, and a mother of three teenagers/ young men who are teaching her, day after day, to be a perfectly imperfect mother.
Born in Farnham in 1961, in the Eastern Townships, Quebec (Canada), third of a family of seven children, from a prolific farmer father and a mother seamstress extraordinaire, Francine lives in Farnham again. She has been teaching ceramics at Concordia University in Montreal as a part-time faculty member since 1993. She also works as a supplementary art teacher for young children at the Val-des-Cerfs school board.
Plant life, life processes and the sacred interconnectedness of all things are the inspiration and the vocabulary of her practice. She works predominantly in ceramics, printmaking and with 
cyanotype, a photographic printing process. Her keen interest in herbalism and its inherent notion of healing, deep ecology , ecofeminism, yoga and spirituality feed her exploration. Over the last thirty years, her work has taken on an installative and interdisciplinary aspect, creating a corpus of enquiry into our relationship with the plant world.
Francine received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax in 1983. She participated in the Banff Centre School of Fine Arts Visual Arts advanced studio program in Banff, Alberta in 1986-1987 and received a Master of Fine Arts from Concordia University in 1993. In the summer 2008, she took part in the Artist-in-Residence Program in Gros Morne, Newfoundland.
She has exhibited her work in Quebec and abroad with solo and group exhibitions in galleries including : Action Art Actuel (Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Quebec), ArtsSutton (Sutton, Quebec), galerie McClure (Montreal, Quebec), Print Zero Studios( Seattle, United-States) 5th Parallel Gallery (Regina University, Alberta, Canada),
SUNY (Buffalo, United States), The Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery, FOFA Gallery and Mouse Print Gallery (Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec), Centre des Arts Shenkman (Ottawa, Ontario), Circa (Montreal, Quebec) and Centre des arts contemporains du Québec à Montréal.
Francine is a member of: Atelier Circulaire, a printmaking studio in Montreal, Action Art Actuel, Arts Sutton, the Nature Printing Society, a non-profit oraganization dedicated to the education, the history and the practice of the art of nature printing, and those who support the philosophy of respect for nature through the art of print. She is also a member of Flora Quebeca, a non-profit association for the awareness, promotion and protection of Quebec’s flora and green landscapes.
She has received various grants from Concordia University Part-time Faculty Association(CUPFA), the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Canada Council for the Arts.
Her work is included in public collections including Collection Prêt d’ Oeuvres d’art du Musée du Québec, Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec and Banque Nationale du Québec.