Véronique Buist: Perceptual Fiber-Scapes
Exhibited online via Artfare and presented by art_works in collaboration with curator Sabine Gilbert, Véronique Buist: Perceptual Fiber-Scapes highlights selected works from four of the artist's distinct series: ton/ton, roche-montagne, paysagisme, and balise.
Detail of balise 11, 2021. Embroidery on handmade paper. 25" x 33" (framed). © Véronique Buist.
Exhibition dates: February 15–March 30, 2022
Platform: Artfare (online)
Artist: Véronique Buist
Curator: Sabine Gilbert
Summary: Exhibited online via Artfare and presented by art_works in collaboration with curator Sabine Gilbert, Véronique Buist: Perceptual Fiber-Scapes highlights selected works from four of the artist's distinct series: ton/ton, roche-montagne, paysagisme, and balise.
About the exhibition: Exuding a hushed sense of purposeful stillness, Montreal-based artist Véronique Buist's dimensional work is as varied as it is cohesive. In her delicate amalgamations of homemade paper and embroidery, she captures the splintering ice of northern territories, the vast slopes of Canadian wilderness, eccentrically structured garden crops, and snow-dappled concrete walls. The sheets of paper on which she embroiders are fashioned from shredded cotton thread and fabric cutouts, allowing her to match the exact tonality of her embroidery designs and create seamless continuity of material.
The exhibition featured four series: ton/ton (tone/tone), an investigation of color and tonalities exploring the poetic potential of fusing textile and paper; roche-montagne (rock-mountain), nature studies initiated in response to the uncertainty of 2020; paysagisme (landscape gardening), inspired by Dutch garden designer Piet Oudolf's preliminary sketches; and balise (beacon), a participatory venture inviting people to share snapshots of meaningful Montreal locations that Buist transforms into paper sculptures. Together, these ephemeral fiber-scapes lead viewers into quiet meditation, retraining our eyes to appreciate beauty in the fabric of our urban and natural spaces.
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Exuding a hushed sense of purposeful stillness, the dimensional corpus of Montréal-based artist Véronique Buist is as varied as it is cohesive. In her delicate amalgamations of homemade paper and embroidery, she astutely captures the splintering ice of northern territories, the vast slopes and rocky mountains of Canadian wilderness, myriad planes of eccentrically structured garden crops, and details of snow-dappled concrete walls. The common thread that binds her diverse series and explorations is just that: thread. This continuous thread plays a layered role in Véronique’s artistic process, as it creeps into all aspects of her work, including the outlines, shapes and base material itself – impressively, the sheets of paper on which she embroiders are also fashioned from shredded cotton thread and fabric cutouts of specific hues. This additional step allows the artist to match the exact tonality of her subsequent embroidery designs, thus creating a deliberate and seamless continuity of material.
Ton/ton (tone/tone) is an investigation of colour and tonalities, a conceptual study in the poetic potential of fusing textile and paper. In these lyrical compositions, Véronique’s lines are crisp and neat, yet charged with sparkling energy that flickers in embroidered twists and turns. From afar, the delicate lines of thread resemble atmospheric pencil marks. However, upon closer inspection, a whimsical maze of ridges, knobs and curls emerge in sets of dynamic tableaux. Falling between abstraction and figuration, these broad swatches of colour and shapes snake together to direct viewers’ attention to hidden fiber-scapes that playfully engage questions of perception and sensation. They encourage the viewer to embark on a perceptual quest to uncover the artist’s multifaceted process, demonstrating that meaning lies far beyond the superficial exterior that first meets the eye.
The second of the selected series, roche-montagne (rock-mountain), was initiated in response to the wake of uncertainty that erupted in 2020. In this artistic reflection, Véronique escapes from stifling city boundaries to retreat into an exhilarating natural haven that is replete with mossy textures and sprawling hillscapes. Mountains are a recurrent motif, simultaneously symbolizing looming obstacles that must still be overcome, as well as comforting shadows reminding us of the ever-enduring stability of the earth. These enchanting nature studies harken back to classical observational drawing approaches, with the artist employing a certain clarity of contour and delineatory constituent that is reminiscent of sixteenth-century Northern landscape artists’ sensitive silhouettes. They additionally recall the aesthetic acuity and subtle harmony with nature that is extolled in the philosophy of Japanese sumi-e ink drawings. In works such as roche 06, Véronique’s abstracted marks particularly evoke a scattering of pine needles and forest detritus, thereby allowing for a crucial visually grounding experience.
Loosely translated to “landscape gardening” in English, the third series titled paysagisme arose following Véronique’s impassioned discovery of Dutch garden designer Piet Oudolf, whose preliminary garden sketches proved to be a bountiful source of vibrant colours, shapes and textures. Departing from these eccentric plans, Véronique’s renditions of landscape designs are unpredictable and malleable, allowing the viewer to imagine the garden in its fully fleshed final state and fantasize about the representational meanings of foliage, flowers, and plants. Viewed from above, these slices of oasis are bursting with potentiality that demands to be materialized and filled with a lush abundance of flora. Spontaneity is juxtaposed with structure, and grid-like sections overlap with a cornucopia of intricate patterns, thereby creating a playful sensory diversion that is equal parts eclectic, textured and buoyant.
Finally, balise (beacon or waypoint) is Véronique’s most recent and ongoing artistic experiment. In this participatory venture, she calls upon peers, friends and followers to send her snapshots of places in Montréal that bear symbolic meaning to them. These coordinates and architectural details range from melancholic alleyways to banal facades, each subsequently interpreted and transformed into paper sculptures to be perceived in an entirely different light. In this investigation, Véronique encourages people to walk around Montréal and uncover the magic in the most mundane aspects of urban life that would otherwise remain ignored. As viewers and participants, we thus become the Wandersmänner theorized by Michel de Certeau – the pedestrians who navigate the veins and arteries of the street, thus embracing the microscopic and escaping totalizations produced by the eye to contribute to an urban text that injects life into the otherwise stark conceptual notion of the city. By encouraging the ebb and flow of pedestrian traffic, Véronique understands the expressive potential of the city, and she celebrates the rich diversity of lived experiences that inform the fabric of the urban experience.
Working in the dynamic shared studio space of Atelier Retailles on Boulevard Saint-Laurent – ensconced in the beating heart of the city – Véronique is immersed in a collective environment that fosters creativity and epitomizes the intoxicating spirit of Montréal. Complete with whirring machines, buckets of pulpy material and a four-legged companion named Zed, the artist’s work space is perfectly equipped for her to synthesize her endless well of inspiration. While each of her series ranges in subject matter, all of Véronique’s ephemeral fiber-scapes arise from the slow time, gestural work and traditional knowledge of embroidery and paper-making, operating in the long and complex legacy of fiber arts. They intentionally lead us into a state of quiet and focused meditation, re-training our eyes to appreciate the beauty in the fabric of our urban and natural spaces. In capturing beacons of winter light, idiosyncratic topographical interventions, and the intimate, personalized coordinates of prosaic locales, Véronique provides us with a fundamental blueprint of harmony that reinforces the importance of examining even the smallest of events from a multiplicity of perspectives.
balise 11, 2021. Embroidery on handmade paper. 25" x 33" (framed). © Véronique Buist.
paysagisme, plan 04, 2020. Embroidery on handmade paper. 4" x 5" / 8" x 10" (framed). © Véronique Buist.
lichen 01, 2020. Embroidery on handmade paper. 16" x 20" / 19" x 23" (framed). © Véronique Buist.
brise-glace, 2021-2022. Embroidery on handmade paper. 12" x 25" (unframed). © Véronique Buist.
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