My practice considers the ways in which landscape and the botanical can call us to self-reflection and be used as a point of entry in the construction of personal and familial narratives. My work explores the ways our relationships with natural environments are mediated through distance and the passage of time, creating conversation between exterior botanical spaces and interior emotional states. The image of the botanical is used as a symbolic mechanism for cultivating care and communicating ways of being-in-landscape non-linearly, through feeling and impression.
My work often approaches image-making through collage, sampling images sourced online and from personal archives (family photos, drawings, etc.) and combining and rearranging visual elements in ways that play with scale and repetition. The decorative is also employed as an organizational framework for the enumeration of collected images or information. Combining screen printing, drawing and photography, I am interested in the process of collage as a methodology that engages both real and imaginary spaces, simultaneously activating the mundane and the spectacular. Finally, my work explores the potential of the two-dimensional surface to create space for alternative modes of visual perception, using repetition, distortion, layering, and transparency as visual mechanisms that allude to movement and transformation, soliciting a heightened state of visual attention.
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Ma pratique considère les façons dont la botanique et les milieux naturels peuvent nous interpeller à l’introspection et agir comme points d’entrées dans la construction de récits personnels et familiaux. J’interroge comment les relations entre les individus et la nature sont conciliés à travers la distance et le passage du temps et je m’intéresse également aux interactions entre les topologies émotionnelles et celles des paysages naturels. L’image de la botanique est utilisée comme mécanisme symbolique désignant la tendresse, qui nomme de façon intuitive des manières alternatives d’habiter et d’interagir avec les espaces naturels.
Souvent mon travail aborde la création d’images par le biais du collage; j’échantillonne des images trouvées sur l’internet et à partir des archives personnelles (photos de famille, dessins, etc.). Ces éléments sont combinés et réorganisés afin de jouer avec l’échelle et la répétition. Les éléments décoratifs et les motifs fait-mains sont également déployés comme structures visuelles qui organisent les images trouvés. En combinant la sérigraphie, le dessin et la photographie, mon travail se sert du processus de collage en tant que méthodologie qui engage à la fois des espaces réels et imaginaires, activant simultanément le banal et le spectaculaire. La répétition, la superposition et la transparence sont déployées comme dispositifs visuels qui font allusion au mouvement et à la transformation, et qui sollicitent chez le spectateur un état accru d’attention visuelle.
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Noelle Wharton-Ayer is a Québec-City based multidisciplinary artist interested in the interaction between exterior botanical spaces and interior psychological and emotional states. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in visual arts from York University and a Master’s degree in visual arts from Université Laval, and worked for several years as studio manager at the artist-run centre Engramme. Noelle’s work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions in Ontario, Quebec, Newfoundland and Europe, and she has participated in artist residencies throughout eastern Canada. Notable projects include La Cascade, which was selected for the summer 2022 programming of Cooperative Méduse’s Bay Window exhibition space. In 2022, she was also a Première Ovation grant recipient for her project Bushwork / Dans la brousse. Noelle has worked as a community arts practitioner in Quebec City since 2019, and in the spring of 2023 she will be artist-in-residence at Jean-De-Brébeuf high school.
Noelle Wharton-Ayer 