Artist Statement

Growing up, I was enchanted by the surroundings of my hometown in northeastern Ontario. I drew influenced by my community and the ambiguities of my Franco-Ontarian culture. To this day, my perceptions, and my work, are conditioned by these impressions, conscious of the impact of our actions on the environment and of our fragile and ephemeral state of being, survival and belonging.

For me, drawing lends itself to the exploration and the sensitivity of these themes; markings on paper cannot be easily masked and are vulnerable by nature. Photography and the mediated image actualize the subject while marking the past. The narrative text suggests culture, history, and the need to tell one’s story. I began writing and making artists’ books, where text, image and structure are bound to explore a related theme: vulnerability, for by nature, a book is handled, providing a greater level of intimacy with its content.

Biography

Roxanne Lafleur lives and works in Ottawa, Canada. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Ottawa. Through drawing, photography and storytelling, her artwork reveals a deep interest in the human condition through themes such as survival, belonging and vulnerability. Her work can be found at Library and Archives Canada, Bibliothèque et archives nationale du Québec, and has been exhibited at various archives and small galleries in Canada, recently at Gallery 101 and the National Arts Centre in Ottawa.

A longtime member of the Canadian Bookbinders and Book Arts Guild, she served as president of its Ottawa Valley chapter, and she is an advisory board member for the Canadian BIPOC Artists Rolodex project.

In her 37-year career at the University of Ottawa Library, she managed the image collections for study and teaching in the Visual Arts and beyond, and later, provided metadata creation, digitization, imaging, and digital curation support as the Digital Humanities support specialist. She served as coordinator for a series of conferences on art and science for the Faculty of Arts and the School of Information Technology and Engineering, as a member of the advisory group for the development of Artstor’s Shared Shelf, an image content management system, and as assistant picture editor in publications at the National Gallery of Canada.