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In my work I focus on architecture as a means to examine the predicament of human existence in nature. Traditionally architecture is represented in painting with the same precision used by the architects who originally created it. By anthropomorphizing the human made environment and using colour and humour to challenge exactitude, I am establishing a sense of paradox. Vivid, juxtaposed complimentary colours borrowed from nature create what one of the great Fauves, Andrè Derain called “sticks of dynamite”. That the architecture reflects its organic environment challenges our assumption that anything human made must exist in variance with nature; an attitude that fosters an endless cycle of disconnectedness. An obsessive but haphazard attention to detail, where the small signifies the whole, describes human scale and our vulnerability before nature.

The use of formal means to establish the paradox of human existence in nature is calculated to jolt the viewer with what Baudelaire called ‘ the shock of recognition’: an awareness of otherness that comes with seeing opposites connect. For me, this moment of recognition allows for compassion and wisdom to arise. As a result, contradictions can be understood as aspects of an elusive indivisibility. In an egocentric society, art can remind us to look beyond the self.

Louise has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Concordia University.
She lives in Montréal, and spends many summer months in Newfoundland.
She has participated in many solo and group exhibitions and her work has been collected throughout the country.
A recent solo exhibition entitled ‘Kingdom of the Rocks” was well received in St. John’s in the summer of 2006.