Artist Statement + Bio + CV
English version of my site probably contains some mistakes. My main intention was to make it as accessible as possible to a non-French-speaking audience, despite its linguistic deficiencies. I hope to improve it in the future.
Artist statement
My practice seeks to establish a relationship with the living through the immediacy and duration of creative action. To this end, I use art to connect with the different realities that surround and inhabit us. Art is conceived as a sensitive experience inseparable from a process of understanding and co-naissance, that is to say a subject and a world being born jointly. Thus, through an artistic approach based on different modes of attention, I learn to observe and experiment life in interaction more finely. 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 private garden (2021-2022), an open-air center (2022), an agricultural organization dedicated mainly to a food bank (2023) and the forest at the edge of which I lived (2024-2025), I seek in these circumstances to realize processes that foster a relationship of affinity with the material and the subjet. In addition, 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 experiment with these fields of interest, motivated by a constant desire for renewal..
For this purpose, my methodology most often consists of artistic explorations, followed by a selection of the most relevant elements for the development of series presenting variations. In the context of residencies, performances and exhibitions, my interest in the creative gesture, the vegetal world, the territory and the notion of inhabiting is combined with a variety of objects. Whether it’s cultivated flax (2015), the vegetal mainly line (2016-2019), the cartographic line (2016-2019), the pine tree (2019), the cabinet of curiosities (2019), a scientific museum devoted to the fjord ecosystem (2020-2021), my garden (2021-2022), the forest of an outdoor center (2022) and an agricultural organization mainly dedicated to a food bank (2023), I seek in these circumstances to foster processes in a relationship of affinity with the substance. In addition, 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 these fields of interest.
Finally, the immersions of several months in these specific environments are intended to produce “artworks” from epistemological and ontological experience. These will be placed in relation to one another according to context, and as an integral part of a quest for meaning.
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 to 2025), 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 and, more recently, to immerse herself for long periods in a territory close to home. She is a finalist in the Talents Contemporains international competition organized by the François Schneider Foundation in France (2018 and 2022). Nathalie Lavoie lives and works in Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean.
