Artist
About the artist
A textile artist with a passion for darts, Catherine Lessard has been pursuing a creative approach rooted in two complementary sources of motivation for over forty years: the duty to remember and the quest for renewal.
Proud and respectful of this unique craft, a witness to our history and culture, she offers an original contemporary reinterpretation combining introspection, poetry and manual labor.
With a perfect mastery of gesture, Catherine Lessard is constantly researching, exploring and creating the medium. With originality and freedom, she manipulates fibers, shaking up and recreating the codes and conventions of highly standardized traditional know-how. The artist transforms the material into daring arrow-like compositions in terms of purpose, size and rendering.
Drawing his inspiration from current events, his works share his thoughts and concerns about social issues. Engaging and charged with symbolism, they convey the grandeur, beauty and precariousness of nature, and question the journey of being and human relationships.
His creative handiwork itself carries metaphorical meaning. The countless fibers and threads the artist manipulates suggest multiple intersecting lifelines, creating as many links between people.
Catherine Lessard’s career is enriched by discoveries made with contemporary Quebec artists. The movement of the threads in her creations, breaking with the linear symmetry of the fléché, is inspired by the pinte work of Jean-Jules Soucy (1951-2022). To Micheline Beauchemin (1929-2009), she owes the ajours scattered throughout various creations. Giogia Volpe’s (1969-…) work deals with human relations and social relationships, and has led her to sculpt the arrow and create large-scale three-dimensional installations.
With audacity and originality, Catherine Lessard places the skilful and patient handwork of our ancestors in a context of unexplored contemporary creation. Beyond the reflections they share, his works are renowned for highlighting the arrow itself. They allow everyone to discover or rediscover, with interest and emotion, an exceptional art form through renewed proposals.
Through her work, she hopes to actively contribute to the dissemination and sustainability of the fléché.
Meet the artist
Come and meet Catherine Lessard and ask her all your questions about her creative process!
Dates and times : Saturday, January 18 | 2 to 4 p.m.
Guided tours: 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.
