Lise-Hélène Larin, PhD, MFA, BFA

Research interests

Bio and Artist Statement

Lise-Hélène Larin(BFA Concordia University 1976, MFA Université du Québec à Montréal 1988, PhD Université du Québec à Montréal 2011) teaches drawing at Concordia University. She also teaches at Dawson College.Early in her career, she did 2D animation at the National Film Board of Canada and for the French TV Network of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) for which she received many prizes.

Larin is a multidisciplinary artist experimenting with drawing, sculpture/performance/installation, and 3Danimation (http://lhl777.wix.com/lisehelenelarin) where her tactile sculptures turned virtual. She created non- figurative 3D animated films that question sculpture, painting, photography as well as 3D animation. She used multiple transparent screens to show her films. Her installations investigate interactivity using anamorphosis, a play on perception where the body must move around the piece to find the ultimate point of view and to read the (moving) image in a meaningful way.

From 2002 to 2019, her 3D work was selected three times at Siggraph and was part of a travelling show all over Europe and the United States. She showed her films at the Sony Centre in Berlin and also in Belgium and the USA. She also received a prize of excellence for her research in 3D animation.

When she does her digital work she says: "My work is about the fragility of art and nature. As the computer infiltrates our social fabric with new energy, fusing traditional disciplines in my 3D software, I like to exploit this hybrid nature, creating a distance from the real and confronting us to this "cold fusion" that ultimately "remediates" the disciplines. PAINTING BY NUMBERS ironises painting and infuses it with movement. My simulated photos, the title of which is SHIFTING TERRAINS, question the new nature of the disciplines as well as Nature itself."

"A big part of my sculpturepractice has been to feed on chaos and the uproar of crumpled newspapersespecially when I included groups of friends and students. This became theonset of an urban forest of paper trees started in 1980 and that spanned 7years. Rubber bands of all sizes ensured the feasibility of my technique. Overand above that, I was twisting the words of others to construct my own language.I used La Presse and The Gazette, two weekly newspapers in Montreal. My hope wasto show how anglophones and francophones could be united by an ecological commongoal. My method became a technique adapted to all. I called it Papierure. Igave workshops all over Québec for kids to become conscious that art could be agreat vehicle to talk about the environment. “Teaching Art by Twisting Words”was my voice in this endeavor.

In 2020 (http://www.lisehelenelarin.com), 40years later, I showed how this action on the environment could be renewed inthe light of Timothy Morton’s concept of the Anthropocene. Ironically, I usedLe Devoir (another Montreal newspaper) as if to show that our duty towards theenvironment had not been completed yet.

The pandemic struck just when myshow finished. Everything became quiet and drab. Alone in my studio, I neededmore than the B/W drawings I usually did. Color became my world. What was I todo? Out of the blue, my attention was caught by intriguing geometric andorganic forms of some crumpled white paper. No more uproar, no more words totwist, only complex arrangements to decrypt. The humming in my ears was theonly noise I heard. That’s when my graphic species started to appear, weird robot/insect/almosthuman like creatures yearning to expand and evolve in a playful way. How couldI ever expect that crumpled paper was the start of renewing my drawing practice?" Lise-HélèneLarin