ABOUT ÉLISABETH MARIER

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ARTISTIC APPROACH

Élisabeth Marier’s work very quickly turned to the evocative properties of materials. Industrial glass was to become her first field of research. She identified its main characteristics: flexibility and rigidity, something and its opposite. Her first pane glass sculptures reflect a frozen moment in the trajectory of a movement to another point of support, with curved planes opposing linear trajectories. Since 1996, she has pursued the concept of the “different multiple”. Her initially very similar constructions lend themselves to the transformations provoked by controlled variations in temperature. Marier draws a parallel between the reactions triggered in the oven and our own permeability to the environment. By capturing the moment of a movement, her eye catches the memory of an attitude, of interaction, of the conditions of the environment and of the soul. 

Thereafter she took on a new challenge: bringing out the full potential of coloured glass sheets. Integrating intuition into her construction, she seeks the exact moment when the sheets of coloured glass fuse under the effect of heat, capturing the bubbles, and playing with chance to conjure up an eloquent moment. Between 2019 and 2021, she undertook a series that she conceptually located “between the abscissa and the ordinate”. Her artworks illustrate the gradual imbalance of our present. Then, a spiritual turnaround ensues. The pictures become monochrome, highlighting the space in which a path unfolds, our own, testifying to our free will. This concept grows and is perfected between the 2018 exhibition Le temps noué and Traces in 2022.

 

TEACHING AND PRACTICE

 Her role in the Espace VERRE educational curriculum was considerable. For 20 years, she has played a major role in training glassworkers. She introduced a personalised approach to the growth and development of the artisan business, allowing the students the freedom to pursue their own ideals. In this context of initial development, Marier explores the many dynamics that combine a given practice with its potential market, in order to set the parameters. In collaboration with Professor Jacques Coutu, she initiated interactions between the thermoforming students at Espace VERRE and the Environmental Design students at UQAM. Later on, she incorporated into her classes the production management process stemming from the manufacture of lampshades designed by designer Michel Dallaire for Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec.

 

Together with artist Jean Michel, Élisabeth Marier is involved in a collaborative practice of custom designs for residential projects. By using leftover stocks of raw materials, she explores derivative creation. However, it is primarily by exploring the fusion of colour to meet the imperatives of these collaborations that she is able to establish ways of working that will later serve her own creation.

 

 

BACKGROUND

Élisabeth Marier first lived in Quebec City, before moving to Montreal. In the 1980s, her glass sculptures were presented in Canada, the United States (SOFA), and Europe, and were simultaneously published in Japan and China. This phase of her career ran parallel to her academic work and her busy family life. Her move to New Brunswick proved pivotal. 

 

Her quest for meaning is articulated differently as it becomes part of her new way of life, surrounded by nature. Her poetic approach enjoys the support of the Acadian francophone artistic community, whose remarkable spirit and vitality offer her inspiration and impetus to take new directions. Her new corpus of works is still related to notions of movement and balance, while her painted glass sometimes integrates the poetry of words.