Artistic Approach + Bio + CV
Artistic approach
My practice seeks to establish a relationship with the world through the immediacy and duration of creative action. To do this, I use art to better understand different realities that surround and inhabit us. Art is conceived as a tool of knowledge; knowledge of the sensitive, immediate knowledge, intuitive knowledge, direct knowledge. It becomes inseparable from a process of understanding and co-naissance, that is to say a subject and a world being born jointly. It emerges a poetry at the same time raw and delicate.
In the context of residencies, performances and exhibitions, my interest in the gesture of creation, territory and the notion of inhabiting is combined with various objects and places. Whether it is a disused church (2008), the brush print (2012-2017), the grid (2012-2014), the cultivated flax (2015), the vegetal line (2016-2019), the cartographic line (2016-2019), the pine tree (2019), the cabinet of curiosities (2019), a scientific museum (2020-2021), a garden (2021-2022), and an open-air center (2022), I seek in these circumstances to realize processes that foster a relationship of affinity with the material.
It is through the varied disciplines of drawing, modeling, video and photography, combined with materials such as ink, clay and elements of nature, that I come into contact with the environment in which I live. And since we are a set of relationships and entanglements that constitute us as well as our environment, I emphasize the processual form within installations that establish close links between the elements that compose it and its exhibition space.
Biographical information
Nathalie Lavoie holds a master’s degree in art from the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi. Previously, she obtained a multidisciplinary bachelor’s degree in anthropology and psychology at Laval University in Quebec City, as well as a major in art history from this institution. In addition, she was coordinator of the Art-image art center at the Maison de la culture de Gatineau from 1995 to 2000. This last date coincides with a return to her native region, after several years in an urban environment. She moved to the Saguenay in an ancestral house-studio in a rural and forested area in order to devote herself to her artistic practice. For the past two decades, her work has been presented in various solo exhibitions in Toronto (2000), Ottawa (2011), Gatineau (2003), Montreal (2005), North Shore (2017, 2019) and Saguenay (2012, 2017, 2019, 2020, 2021), as well as in group exhibitions in Canada, France, Germany and Chile, notably at the Humboldt University in Berlin (2017). Also, artistic residencies in different places allow him to pursue his research abroad. Three books are dedicated to her work. Nathalie Lavoie lives and works in Saguenay-Lac Saint-Jean.