Universal Danseuse

2024 · Oil-based aerosol paint and ice on canvas · 40 x 48 in (101.6 x 121.9 cm)
Paired poem: “Universal Danseuse” by Margaret Atwood

Universal Danseuse emerged through an ekphrastic process I developed in collaboration with the McGill Poetry Matters collective, where poetry is translated into abstract visual experience rather than literal illustration. Taking its title from Margaret Atwood’s poem, the painting seeks to embody emotion and sensation through material abstraction.

I discovered the poem while browsing Canadian poetry at my local library, and it resonated with me instantly. My family roots in Quebec’s Eastern Townships run through both English and French generations. I grew up mostly in an anglophone community on my father’s side, yet I love French culture and my French family, so I have long lived with a layered sense of belonging: deeply connected to this place, and at times an outsider in it. Quebec’s landscape, language and seasons have shaped my vision.

What moved me most was the poem’s visceral sense of lived experience: taste, memory, landscape and emotional texture. I didn’t engage with it intellectually. I felt it physically and emotionally, and that response became central to the painting.

Atwood’s poem is a love note to a Quebec winter morning. It begins with a sunrise at Charny glowing in sweet citrus and berry tones, looks over snow fields so beautiful in the early light that they could pass for a postcard, and closes on an affectionate admission: this province earns its beauty. The painting doesn’t illustrate those images. It carries their warmth and cold in colour and surface, with coral and rose blooms rising over pale blue and deep indigo, crusted with small crystalline marks left by the ice.

I painted it outdoors in the Eastern Townships on an unseasonably warm evening in late September, the light filtering through tall trees as the ice and paint melded. I returned the next day to see the result, and I was thrilled with what the ice had done.

I included Universal Danseuse in my 2024 application for a Guggenheim Fellowship. Preparing it pushed me to define my ice paintings on my own terms and to take my art seriously. In December 2024 the painting was shown in Abstractions with the University Club of Montreal. The exhibition let me present the concept behind the ice paintings and their pairing with poems, which gives each piece a heartbeat. It was well presented and a success.