2022 VISUAL SIGNATURE
NICOLE HACHÉ

Biography

Nicole Haché is an Acadian visual artist from Lamèque Island, currently based in Caraquet, New Brunswick. She works in painting, installation, photography and performance. Self-taught, she has asserted herself in the arts through exhibitions, presentations and artist residencies, and has been a recipient of several grants from the New Brunswick Arts Board.

She presently sits on the board of directors for the Blue Constellation Artists Centre in Caraquet and is a member of CARFAC Maritime and the Galerie Sans Nom in Moncton. She was also on the board of directors for the Acadian Association of Professional Artists of New Brunswick (AAAPNB) (2015-2019).

Nicole Haché’s work has been the subject of several solo and group exhibition projects. In 2009, she participated in the Salon d'Automne de Paris. In addition to shows in Canada and France, she has exhibited in the United States, Belgium, Italy, Spain and Egypt. She has taken part in several artist residencies, notably in France, Burkina Faso, the Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativity and the Vaste et Vague Artist Center in Carleton-sur-Mer. In 2019, she was a participant in a Cultural Creation Residency, organized and toured in New Brunswick by the AAAPNB, ArtsLink and Mawi’art. Since 2013, she has been promoting contemporary art and artists in schools across the province, a project set up by the New Brunswick Art Bank. She also works freelance for various film companies.

 

Artist statement

Nicole Haché questions social constructions and explores systems of communication, investigating how these interact with various mechanisms specific to human behavior. Through her work, she examines the relationships that underline a community, and she willfully aims to produce tangible, material results from everyday experiences by employing specific elements thought out, chosen and developed over time.

Her work tirelessly explores diversity and continually questions the workings of interpersonal relationships. Seeking to depict a place where science and aesthetics merge, the artist conceptualizes a parallel between these disparate fields and creates links between art, science and society.

Her medical laboratory training has shaped her work ethic, which is firmly focused on research, creation and the achieving of hybrid visual results.

Nicole Haché's visual stance operates around different but decidedly related fields. Hers is a complex and inspired strategy that expresses a contemporary view of the world. She questions the social models that leave their indelible traces on our being, and offers us new intimate spaces, which widen the borders of our plural identities.

Primavera

It is as a visual signature of the Lamèque International Baroque Music Festival that this body of work, Primavera, was created, inspired by the theme of the 2022 edition, "Everything is turning", which explores the different stages of life through the music of Telemann and J.S. Bach.

The program incorporates the Primavera concept, spring, this season when everything awakens, just as much as funeral cantatas, to evoke the journey from birth to death. This cycle reminds us that the finality of life marks the beginning of a new cycle that begins in another way, like a luminous Ending.

Between the beginning and the end, everything turns like the cycle of the seasons, the return of spring which reveals its light after the great cold. The works in this series are imbued with radiant colors, sometimes accompanied by pearly and coppery hues. Organicity and circular shapes refer to movement, to the defining moments that punctuate our lives and that swirl in the carousel of passing time.

In all intimacy, Primavera underlines the beauty of this passing time, the eternal return of spring light.

Nicole Haché is celebrating the 20th anniversary of her professional artistic career this year. A portion of the sales of these works will be donated to the Lamèque International Baroque Music Festival, and a percentage of the sales will support the cause of the Ukrainian people.