Micheline Beauchemin – Essay

by Laurier Lacroix

Each material and each technique used to create art has its own particular qualities. Yarn — a fine, formless, fragile material — easily lends its supple plasticity and malleable elasticity to the transfiguration of light. Whether braided, woven, crocheted, knitted, knotted or used to embroider, yarn transforms itself into the patterns and material of colour. In the case of Micheline Beauchemin, yarn gives full expression to the passion that has transformed her life into a continuous investigation of form and an unending search for meaning. Her work reflects her constant need to provoke a regenerative experience, one single, sensual, changing, invigorating, concentrated ray of light at a time.

Micheline Beauchemin has created a rich body of work that confounds our usual understanding of tapestry, sculpture or the integration of art and architecture, and that mines the potential of each to its fullest. Given her predilection for certain techniques and materials, the term "weaving" has often been used to try to describe her approach to art, and yet her creations, unfurling profusely within a space, extend beyond the loom. On countless occasions, this artist has met the challenge of placing her work in a specific architectural space through a wonderful embrace of logic and magic.

Midway through the 1950s, when Micheline Beauchemin decided that her art would be devoted to work with yarn, centuries-old traditions still dictated the rules of the art of tapestry, even though certain formal and stylistic innovations had, admittedly, breathed new life into the technique. Artists like Jean Lurçat had introduced new concepts to the discipline, and certain painters had provided designs that found expression in the language of warp and weft.

It remained, however, for the vocabulary of tapestry to be reinvented, and it was for artists such as Beauchemin to give it a truly contemporary cast. They took a fresh look at the nature of chosen materials, reconceived fabrication and assembly techniques, and, by freeing tapestry of the wall and its decorative role, lent it a sense of movement previously unknown. This creative approach sought to convey a sensibility that transposes the relationship to space and light; it sought to renew the bases through which the work might be experienced in all its physical and poetic dimensions.

Beauchemin chose to explore yarn’s mass, lending it density and presence. During the early years of her career, she favoured wool for the warmth of its colours, but, in the mid-1960s, traded this in for a range of threads and fragments of more diverse materials. Whether the fibres were vegetable, mineral, synthetic or optical, she extended them through subtleties of shades, volume and substance that had the effect of animating the wall and casting the space within an entirely different register.

Micheline Beauchemin is particularly interested in the conception of space. The many works that she has created as part of projects integrating art and architecture illustrate her understanding of a building’s volumes, lighting, functions and uses. Each time, she has known how to adapt her creations to the proportions, orientation and purpose of the structure, as well as to the specific space they occupy. Indeed, her close working relationships with architects has endowed her works with an identifying or iconic function in respect to these buildings. Thus, the gleaming stage curtain of the National Arts Centre’s Southam Hall in Ottawa (1966–1969) still opens ever so effectively onto the world of wonders and dreams that is the performing arts; the gigantic Ailes nordiques. Couleur du temps (1984) at Montreal’s Palais des Congrès fulfils its mission of both drawing attention to the immensity of the hall and welcoming convention-goers by the sparkle of its small, silver blades.

Beauchemin’s art synthesizes thought and gesture to such an extent that her work retains a monumental quality even when it is designed on a reduced scale. In the same way, her works, which only reveal their formal precision to those who adopt the all-embracing perspective that they command, provide on close scrutiny an opportunity to admire the variety of shades and tones, as well as the diversity of materials and signs.

This formal richness was developed by the artist during periods of study and work in Japan, as well as through her travels in Latin America. These sojourns in part fulfilled the desire to familiarize herself with the great range of textile products and traditions in this age-old, universal art form. Her investigations led her to imagine new ways of assembling materials and arranging colours in subtle combinations.

Beauchemin grew up and continues to live beside the St. Lawrence River, and the waterway has never ceased to inhabit her. From her home in Les Grondines, located on the north shore of the river between Trois-Rivières and Quebec City, she can observe the infinite variations in light and atmospheric conditions that inspire her creative work. The forms and substances that she invents are also drawn from the play of light upon the moving waters at various times of the day and year. Micheline Beauchemin values the qualities of these spaces filled with shades of a white, grey, golden or silver emptiness. Monochromes of pearl imprinted forever on her memory from a journey through the Arctic also live on in several of her works.

Micheline Beauchemin’s art has enjoyed an international renown, and her work has gained her commissions in several countries as well as recognition in the form of career achievement awards. London City Hall, in the United Kingdom, was one of the first institutions to acquire one of her pieces; numerous other works created in collaboration with architects can be found in Japan, Europe, the United States and, of course, Canada. Her work is also included in the collections of Canada’s major museums.

Through her work, entrepreneurial talent and vision, Micheline Beauchemin has earned recognition for her multi-layered conception of tapestry as an art of its own. By unfurling lustrous bronze and deep monochromes in public buildings, Beauchemin has suffused these spaces with an energy that provides all those passing by with a more human experience.