Indigenous Artist Bio
Lise Melhorn-Boe studied at the University of Guelph and Wayne Sate University, in Detroit. She has exhibited widely across Canada and the United States. Her work is in many public and university collections including the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Canada Council Art Bank, Library and Archives Canada, the National Gallery in Ottawa, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
She has had solo exhibitions at The Art Gallery of Sudbury, The Timmins Museum Centre, the Art Gallery of Algoma, The Emma Ciotti Gallery (Iroquois Falls), the Art Gallery of Temiskaming (Haileybury), The Robert McLaughlin Gallery (Oshawa), The Lake Galleries (Toronto) and the University of Toronto’s Scarborough Campus Gallery, White Water Gallery and W.K.P. Kennedy Gallery (both in North Bay), Modern Fuel, The Window Gallery and The W.D. Jordan Special Collections Library, Queen’s University (in Kingston), The University of Calgary Special Collections Library and St. Mary’s University Gallery (Calgary), Ho Tam Press (Vancouver) and the Marianne van Silfout Gallery, St. Lawrence College (Brockville.)
Melhorn-Boe lives in Kingston, Ontario.
Website: www.lisemelhornboe.ca
Artist Statement
I have been making artist’s books for over forty years. Through a feminist lens, I have examined issues in contemporary women’s lives, such as body image, relationships, and socialization, as well as environmental health concerns. I have used a variety of materials and techniques in my work, choosing what seems to be the most appropriate structure for the content: sometimes this has been sewn fabric.
I almost always start with the text, and enjoy playing with the form that the book takes, trying to make the structure tell a story of its own. Recently I have chosen to explore sewing as the subject of a series of books—challenging myself to create unusual sewn fabric book structures. The texts are all poems, so when the topic of "Flight" was suggested, I looked to poetry and was enchanted with this charming poem about cabbage butterflies.
