Diane Morin

Diane Morin creates various simple yet unusual mechanisms in which matter and light intervene to generate micro-events. She is often associated with artists who employ technology, but she is distinguished by her artisanal fabrication of objects and forms, whose setting in motion by machines creates poetic and original visual, sound, and kinetic effects.

Morin was born in Saint-Joseph-de-Kamouraska and grew up in the region near Saint-Jean-Port-Joli. During her stay at Est-Nord-Est, she and her cousin emptied the house that had belonged to her recently deceased grandmother. There, she rediscovered objects accumulated over a lifetime, including weaving materials and equipment, as well as a small figure roughly hewn out of wood. Although these odds and ends brought up many memories, Morin used them, instead, as vocabulary in an exploratory process with matter, light, and movement.

Out of plaster, she moulded balls of wool, shuttles, and thread bobbins, which she presented side by side as a sort of inventory. She casted several copies of the figurine that she had found, fixing in hardened liquid matter the barely started wood carving. Added on the floor were photographs of melted and set metal or hardened plaster – a mixture of various materials, testifying to the agency of matter. In front of a window, a frame-by-frame animation set moulds of balls of wool in motion. Low-angle lighting projected onto the wall the silhouettes of the moulded figures, grouped and animated by light. For Morin, photography and video are based on a linking of material micro-phenomena that often obliterate the image. In this sense, her work at Est-Nord-Est revealed her creative process, from her sources of inspiration to her production methods, to the staging of the objects she makes.

Here, by transposing objects that had belonged to her grandmother, she assumed a certain kinship with her artisanal work, despite the differences in their respective areas of expertise. In a less personal register, she also referred by association to the traditional art of wood sculpting for which Saint-Jean-Port-Joli is known, and to more contemporary art.