The strong and wise beaver plays a central role in the ancient stories passed through generations of the Anishinaabe, Indigenous peoples largely based around the Great Lakes of North America. In one account, the mighty animal creates the hills of the Outaouais region in western Quebec, where visual artist Caroline Monnet was raised by her Anishinaabe mother and French father.
When she was approached by luxury furniture maker Humble Nature (also based in the province) years later to design the limited-edition Amik chair and table, the landscape’s undulating silhouette and the mythology it’s shrouded in immediately sprang to mind. “I thought it would be beautiful to embed that story in the pieces,” she recalls.
Made by hand in Quebec out of local ash, these curving, nature-inspired forms expand Monnet’s personal multidisciplinary oeuvre. After studying sociology and communications and a stint at Radio-Canada in Winnipeg, Monnet fell deeper in love with cinema. She was in Winnipeg at the time—a city she was drawn to because the “Indigenous presence is extraordinary,” she says—and amid an inclusive arts scene where “architects mixed with chefs and musicians,” she “found a passion for the craft of moving images, an outlet that allowed me to have a voice and work with my emotions, my vulnerabilities, and my sensibilities.”
Ikwé, the first short film she wrote and directed, premiered in 2009 at the Toronto International Film Festival and illuminates the power of ancestral wisdom. Others followed, probing the struggles and strengths of First Nations communities, while she experimented with sculpture, painting, and installation to meditate on subjects spanning Canada’s passing of the devastating Indian Act in 1876.
Notions of identity first gripped Monnet in childhood, as did her appreciation for building supplies. “My parents used to flip old cottages outside of Ottawa, so I grew up around renovations, coming home from school putting insulated wool in the walls and surrounded by chaos,” she explains. “I’ve always been interested in transforming the industrial into something poetic.”
Aiming to spark dialogue and discussion, Monnet chooses mediums thoughtfully. “If I want to talk about cultural genocide, it’s more impactful if it becomes an object, almost like a monument. If I want to talk about how cities and nature are intimately connected, it makes more sense to use construction materials,” she says.
She regularly pores over such products in hardware stores, noting their colors and textures as she roams the aisles. Traditional applications of gypsum board or polyethylene pipes entice her less than the imaginative potential they hold. At Chantier Monnet, her creative studio, the focus is on contemporary assemblages that embrace the likes of rope, stone, Styrofoam, and air membrane barriers. Worksite, her solo exhibition at Arsenal Contemporary Art’s gallery in New York, opening this September, will further examine these simple items in the context of how cities are developed “in the name of progress, adds Monnet, “but did it on the backs of trees.”
This article originally appeared in HD’s August 2023 issue.