Annie France Leclerc is a visual artist originally from Bas-St-Laurent. She has lived and worked in Montreal for nearly fifteen years. Her multidisciplinary practice is rooted in the photographic act, and extends to printmaking, installation and performance. Her work has recently been presented at Galerie de l’UQAM (2021), L’imprimerie center d’artistes (2021-2022), Centre Expression and Vrille Art Actuel as part of the Orange contemporary art event (2022).

Approach and works on display

les verts submergent, les jaunes font baume (2021-2023)

This young artist has made her home in Ahuntsic’s Parc du Boisé-de-Saint-Sulpice, and knows all the players, especially the “weeds” – a relative term, since every plant has something to offer. Of course, there are local and foreign invasives, and it’s into this competition that Annie France Leclerc has entered. In a filmed performance, she dug up, moved and uprooted to care for the small woodland. It’s a task that requires patience, humility and, above all, a quality of attention that touches us and leads us, in turn, to consider all the plants around us and to imagine their stories and relationships: both those of the well-ordered flowerbeds, and the “wild” grasses, free and brazen. With some of them – buckthorn, staghorn sumac, garlic mustard, Virginia creeper, tansy, mugwort, goldenrod, sorrel or St. John’s wort – she concocted tinctures in which the silks and cottons in suspension were soaked. The result is an astonishing palette ranging from yellow to bluish, soft and fragile, sensitive to light, which in its own way tells the story of the potential of all plants, putting into perspective the labels attached to good and bad biodiversity.

Works by the artist