Marie Côté
Marie Côté’s artistic practice is divided into both pottery and sculpture – both feeding her imagination where the hollow becomes a container of stories ripe for the telling. Stating, “the source of any form is a void – like a pot needing to be filled,” her work seeks to reveal the complex experience that links an object to space. While the importance of centering and forming shape is transferred to her sculpture,
the artist draws our attention to the play of light and shadow, of visual perceptions, and more recently, to the immateriality of interior spaces where sounds resonate.
When you put your ear to a seashell and feel that you can hear the surf of the ocean, you are essentially experiencing a miniature soundscape. Sounds can evoke an entire landscape as our imagination enriches this encounter with images, smells, other sounds and memories mined from our personal libraries of experience. Côté’s soundscape installations evoke poetic and abstract imagery of a specific place and time.
Whether capturing the wind by sculpting maps of its currents, viewing a horizon line painted while in the Arctic, or hearing the sounds of the North, Côtés monumentally expansive works speak of large open natural spaces. While her sound installations recreate the sonority of a given space, her two-dimensional works also carry a lyrical, almost musical quality.
Montreal artist Marie A. Côté attended the Winter and Summer Studies Program in Ceramics at the Banff Centre School of Fine Arts (1980-82), received a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from Concordia University (1985) and received further training at Liverpool Polytechnics in England. She has been the subject of three documentaries; Chante ma passion by Medhi Benboubakeur, presented at the Festival international d’art, FIFA and Les escales improbables de Montréal, L’art du deuxième usage by Teridan Productions and L’art du contenant/contenu by Raphaëlle Rousseau.
She has exhibited her work regularly since 1986 including solo exhibitions at Myrtle Street Gallery in Liverpool, and Nuha Al-Ali Gallery in Syria and Galerie Lilian Rodriguez in Montreal. Her collaborative multi-disciplinary works have been presented at Galerie Oboro, and have been part of Elektra festival international d’arts numériques, the Upart Festival in Toronto and others. Galerie Lilian Rodriguez has represented her works at the Toronto International Art Fair and she has been part of numerous group exhibitions in France and throughout Quebec. These include exhibitions at Art Mûr, Galerie Circa, Centre de céramique Bonsecours, 8e Biennale nationale de céramique de Trois-Rivières, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Biennale de céramique contemporaine de Châteauroux (France) and SOFA-Chicago.
Her works are included in many public art collections, including the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Canada Council Art Bank, Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Gardiner Museum, Loto-Québec Collection, Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery, Daniel Weetaluktuk Memorial Museum and Cultural Transmission Centre collection, in Inukjuak, as well as in many private collections.