Émilie B. Côté

Deeply rooted in her rural region and inspired by its singularities, the artist's reflection essentially gravitates on the essence of the human being in relation to the territory she inhabits. With an installative approach, she tries to create poetic pieces that testify to her reflections on our human condition, what links us to our habitat and the mutations it undergoes. She is interested in and questions the organizational systems that are put in place to distort the environment for practical purposes, and highlights the fight of the plant kingdom in an environment increasingly subject to the pressures of human presence.

By picking in the forest, she works with organic and plant matter that she contradicts with sterile and rigid materials to create pieces that reflect her vision of a world where beauty rubs shoulders with ruins. Her artworks are in themselves universes where several dualities coexist: nature and urbanity, delicacy and rigidity, or more generally, life and death. But what interests her is life. The one that resumes its course and finds its way, resilient and mute.

Plaster, steel and concrete, resolutely urban materials, meet bryophytes, this large family of mosses and lichens, then polypores, these fungi that grow on trees. The idea of the invasion of an arid surface by a living organism is a recurring aspect in her work. It punctuates the space with small rebirths, where death gives way to a new life in an eternal cycle of restart.