Francine Potvin, MFA, BFA

Francine Potvin is a visual artist, a teacher, an avid gardener and a plant aficionado. She has three sons who are successful in training her to be a perfectly imperfect mother. The awe-inspiring secret life of plants and the sacred interconnectedness of all things are the subject and the terrain she delves into for her creative process. She has a keen interest in herbalism, deep ecology and ecofeminism. Her yoga practice and a fascination with buddhist philosophies also cross-pollinate her approach to life and art making.

Francine works mostly in ceramics, printmaking and with a photographic printing process called cyanotype. Over the last thirty years, her work has taken on an interdisciplinary aspect, culminating into installations of botanical images which aim at reviving reverence and enchantment towards indigenous native plant life.  It is an invitation to contemplation, rootedness and a way of reinventing images of the anima mundi.

A part-time faculty member in Ceramics  at Concordia University since 1993, Francine is also a supplementary art teacher for young children at the Val-des-Cerfs school board in the Eastern Townships where she lives.

She has shared her work in Quebec and abroad in numerous solo and group exhibitions and received various grants from the Concordia University Part-time Faculty Association (CUPFA), the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Canada Council for the Arts.

Her work is included in public collections including Collection Prêt d' Oeuvres d'art du Musée du Québec , Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec and Banque Nationale du Québec.

Education

MFA Concordia University, Montreal, 1993
Visual Arts Advanced Studio Program, Banff Centre School of Fine Arts 1987
BFA Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax, 1983

Areas of expertise

Paper clay, collagraphy, cyanotype, Quebec wild flora and medicinal plants

Research interests

Notions of healing, herbalism, ecofeminism and ethnobotany.