BIOGRAPHY

Micheline Couture lives in Montreal and at Havre-aux-Maisons in Les Îles-de-la Madeleine. She has a diploma from the École des Beaux-Arts de Montréal (School of Fine Arts of Montreal) and a master’s degree from Concordia University. She won scholarships to participate in workshops at Les ateliers Desjoberts in Paris and the Fiber Art Center in Berkeley.

She has teached at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) where she worked at the foundation of the master’s degree in the Fine Arts Department and created fiber printing workshops and computer teaching courses.

In 1997, she has teached the silkscreen printing technique to artists of the Taller Grabador at Holguin, Cuba. From 1988 to 2001, she ran the Galerie d’art Point Sud at Havre-aux-Maisons in Les Îles-de-la-Madeleine where exhibitions by Carole Piéalue, Jean-Luc Turbide, Adrienne Luce, André Lapointe, Marlène Devost, Jean-François Cyr, etc. took place.

Besides her participation at the Biennales de la tapisserie contemporaine de Montréal in 1981, she worked actively within the Conseil des arts textiles du Québec where she assumed the presidency during two years. She took part in many Revue Numéro, exhibited with the artists from the CATQ, at the Galerie de l’UQAM, at Galerie Arts Sutton, the Galerie du Centre in Saint-Lambert, at the Galerie d’art Point Sud in Havre-aux-Maisons, the Biennale Internationale d’art miniature du Témiscamingue, the Biennale du lin in Normandy, France, the Galerie R3 of the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières (UQTR) and the Galerie Art Mûr in Montreal. She took part in «Lange Linceul» in 1994 and in «Penser Bildung» in 2002, two travelling exhibitions across the Province of Quebec.

She assumed several curating of exhibitions including «Textile, support, matière» with five artists from UQAM : Marie Langlois, Lise Nantel, Louise Jamet, Marcel Saint-Pierre and Micheline Couture at Galerie de l’UQAM and at the Centre d’exposition de Gatineau in 1986.

The artist follows her textile explorations with two dimensional wall pieces putting together fabrics and dyed or printed papers. Now oversized works are produced by assembling small formats like in “La nuit, le jour”. From now on, they are small and light to carry.

Here are the matters that articulate her works: fabric clippings from other pieces, papers and textile material gleaned, like the serial of obsolete bank notes, dyed and block printed cotton, embroideries.

Her themes are all very familiar: childhood, house, maritime spaces, and elements like water, hearth, clouds, and planets.

Research of these archetypes gathers shape and content: motif, symmetry, square, and circle composing the textile materials as support and surfaces.