Louise Paillé holds a BA in history from Université Laval (1973), an MA in art studies (1994) and a PhD in the study and practice of art (2000) from the Université du Québec à Montréal. In addition to participating in many group and solo exhibitions, she has held performances and completed a number of artist residencies in Quebec and in France. In 2013, she received visual arts awards from both the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec (CALQ) and the Conseil de la culture et des communications de la Mauricie (CCCM). An art historian, exhibition curator and author of critical texts, Paillé is primarily known for her Livres-Livres (“book-books”), created by transcribing the entire contents of a book into another book on the same subject in dense, almost illegible handwriting, the colour of which is particularly important and obscures the type in the background. These palimpsests thus transform the host book into an intertextual art object. Recently, she traded her pencils for needles, her lines of handwriting for rows of knitting, to make Torchons: small cloths that can be passed down, kept as charms or even remade or undone.
SEE:
« Foreign Bodies » by Natacha Carron, ESPACE #27, p. 26.
« La couleur de l’écriture : Les oeuvres récentes de Louise Paillé » by Nycole Paquin, ESPACE #70, p. 46.
