BIO A graduate of Université Laval at the turn of the new millennium, Julie Picard is an artist recognised for her paper installations. She won the gold medal in sculpture at the 6th Jeux de la Francophonie in Beirut. Her work has been shown in Canada, Europe, Lebanon and Australia and can be found in private, institutional and museum collections.
ARTISTIC PRACTICE Julie Picard has been working with paper for twenty years now. Her artistic practice incorporates an ecological approach. She uses paper in her sculptural work by artistic choice and personal commitment. Paper is fragile and ephemeral, and Picard’s artistic practice includes fleeting, nomadic, flexible and deployable interventions. She seeks to make and to remake the world out of our everyday scraps of paper: newspapers, magazines, leaflets and flyers. Through poetic inquiry into the material, she thinks about the notion of lastingness and about the act of wanting to leave a trace of oneself.
PROJECT For her project, Julie Picard has chosen to work with printed newsprint. In her studio, she will read newspapers simultaneous to cutting up their pages and stacking them up. The pages will conceal their content and reveal only the thickness of the sheet of paper. This compacting process physically and symbolically reproduces the sedimentation process. She will then proceed to cut the paper up into transversal slices. These slices will be exposed to the force of water and to the heat of the sun, causing them to become petrified. The documents of petrified paper will serve as archives both to create a memory of the text that was printed on it and to retain the traces of its fabrication-transformation. The material will be inserted into glass containers in order to preserve but also to observe it. Picard’s studio will be transformed into an exploratory laboratory.
