Artist Caroline Monnet repurposes building-yard materials as high art in pieces such as the plywood sculpture 'When It's Fall, I Rest' (2021).Toni Hafkenscheid/Courtesy of the artist and Blouin-Division Gallery.
You might think of plywood as a cheap and banal building material, but in the hands of Caroline Monnet it can become fine art. The Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau has mounted a large exhibition of the Montreal artist’s sculptures, and the centrepiece is an arresting sculpted landscape made from multiple layers of plywood lacquered to a soft sheen.
The big, horizontal piece sitting on a low plinth reads like a topographical map, as though its brown and beige swirls and ovals denote different elevations in the landscape, but it also features its own elevations, areas where the wood rises up into little knolls that might represent hills or mountains. It is aesthetically beautiful but also plays with notions of scale and representation, not merely of the landscape but also of the body in relationship to the land: The sculpture is titled When It’s Fall, I Rest.
It might be tempting to say the piece transcends plywood, but Monnet’s building-yard media are often her point. She uses not only plywood but also strand board, concrete, copper wire, pink insulation, roof underlay, roofing felt, air barrier membrane, waterproofing membrane and vapor barrier – a list of ubiquitous yet (to the layperson) mysterious materials. Viewers may find themselves looking very closely at the labels in this show of the artist’s work from the past decade, curated by Mona Filip.
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Monnet’s motifs, meanwhile, are often Algonquin geometries drawn from her maternal heritage – her mother comes from the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg First Nation in the Outaouais region; her father is French – as she takes her inspiration from traditional practices such as embroidery and birch-bark biting. The result, in colourful embroidered panels where ancient art meets the Home Depot, serves as a reflection on Indigenous relations with modernity and more specifically on the housing crisis on reserves.
Monnet's sculpture 'Portage of the Woman' (2023) suggests both the landscape and the body.Toni Hafkenscheid/Courtesy of the artist and Blouin-Division Gallery.
KIWE is piece in which those capital letters are spelled out in Plexiglas forms stuffed with pink glass-wool insulation material. The word means to return home in Anishinaabemowin, and in this context suggests both the continuance of a cycle and something yet to be completed. Monnet’s parents renovated and flipped houses in Gatineau when she was growing up; she is well acquainted with half-finished projects.
The wooden sculptures are less pointed and speak to a more spiritual or universal relationship with land and home. When It’s Fall, I Rest, which is a 2021 piece from a private collection, hints at the relationship between the land and the body; Blending into One and Portage of the Woman, 2023 pieces made in oak and maple respectively, make the connection explicit, starting from a rectangular piece of laminated wood but producing undulating forms that echo the human figure.
They are both pleasing modernist sculptures and reflections on our connection to the Earth in a period when we seem incapable of halting its destruction, works that glide successfully between formal and thematic concerns.
Monnet's Wound series of 2023 uses Kevlar fabric, comparing the invincible space-age material with the frailty of the land and the body.Toni Hafkenscheid/Courtesy of the artist and Blouin-Division Gallery.
Monnet is not always that subtle. Surprisingly, since she began her career as a filmmaker not a sculptor, the two video works in the show are less convincing. In particular, Spring (2022), a dreamy three-minute video with an on-screen text in English about dancing, is a classic example of shooting fish in a barrel: It’s a retort to a 1921 letter seeking to ban Indigenous dance that was written by Duncan Campbell Scott, the Canadian poet who was also deputy superintendent of Indian Affairs.
On the other hand, Monnet’s more abstract work can be heart-rending in its evocation of the tension between nature and culture. The show also includes the Wound series, three small sculptures made of twisted pieces of Kevlar fabric, the shapes again suggesting the body and the land – and evoking the vulnerability of both in contrast to the promise of invincibility offered by a space-age material.
In 2025, Monnet created Smoke, a wall-mounted sculpture set in rectangular frame, simply by stacking short strips of dark grey air barrier membrane in a horizontal line and sewing them to a backing. This produces a small panel of dark leaves made from some unknown but visibly fragile material that seems to evoke burnt paper or lost feathers. After all the fires this land has suffered in the last two summers, it’s a viscerally evocative piece.
Commenting on the Indigenous housing crisis, Monnet embroiders traditional Anishnaabe patterns on construction materials, here using synthetic roofing felt as the backing for 'Memories Unravelled' of 2021.Toni Hafkenscheid/Courtesy of the artist and Blouin-Division Gallery.
Pizandawatc/The One Who Listens continues at the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau until Sept. 8.