One to Watch
Marie Elaine Lalonde
Marie Elaine focuses on the concept of landscape and territory. Through her artistic practice, she explores the morphological similarities found in nature amongst discordant worlds and fields, including organic, topographic, cartographic, botanic, and geologic. She uses photography as a means to capture the landscape and its details, and collects material that will later be scanned. She then reappropriates the information collected on site with digital image processing, printmaking techniques, drawing, and painting.
What are the major themes you pursue in your work?
My work focuses on the notions of landscape and territory. I am particularly interested in exploring the morphological similarities found in nature at the small and large scales. I seek to illustrate the formal links between the landscape taken as a whole and its details through hybridization and combination processes. The evocation that arises is a form of reminiscence of the sense of place, a more or less conscious material memory, a deep remembrance of the territory.
My creation process develops from the field to the workshop. I use photography as a means to capture landscapes and details, collecting material that will later be scanned. It allows me to build a database with which I initiate my research. I work towards an artistic reappropriation of the information collected on site with digital image processing, printmaking techniques, drawing, and painting.
What was the best advice given to you as an artist?
A printmaking professor once told us: “Printing is like breathing: you inspire, then you place the support and expire when you print.” It prepares gestures and brings focus, presence, fluidity, rhythm; working becomes a sort of dance.
Prefer to work with music or in silence?
Both. It depends if I need to escape or stay focused. Ambient music inspires me, especially when it brings a sense of space, images of landscapes. These days I listen to Loscil, Hildur Guðnadóttir, Nils Frahm, Jóhann Jóhansson, Julia Kent, Peter Broderick, Clogs, Keith Jarrett, Hauschka, Anouar Brahem, Jon Hopkins, Greg Haines, Aaron Martin…
I also very often work without music. As John Cage’s composition 4′33″ makes us realize, silence does not exist since we always hear sounds and rustlings. I remain attentive to the sounds I produce when I work. It allows me to have a stronger presence as well as to stay more grounded and focused.
If you could only have one piece of art in your life, what would it be?
I think I would appreciate living with one of Theo Jensen’s “Strandbeest” cinetic sculptures. It would be energetic and endearing, as they are so evolutionary and dynamic!
Who are your favorite writers?
Quickly, I think: J.M.G. Le Clézio, Michel Houellebecq, Georges Bataille, Alexandro Jodorosky, and Hermann Hesse.
