POULIN, Daniel (1949)

Daniel Poulin’s career was kick-started by his involvement as a founding member in the creation of the Boréal Multimédia group (1987). He has participated in exhibitions in Canada, the United States and Europe, and he published Vagabondages, an account of a solo canoe trip in the Laurentian region, in 2011. This project is in the same vein as his environmental works, which combine natural with machine-made materials; they are meant to pay tribute to the places in which they are installed, as seen in Le lieu-Lien (1988), a fountain sculpture in Parc de l’Annonciation. While Poulin considers nature to be a vital experience, his practice differs from Land Art – fundamentally isolated from and unrelated to the common networks of art – in its principal aim of establishing contact with local communities. These have included the Cree at Great Whale River (Sépulture, 1991) and the Aboriginal people of Vancouver Island (Arbre reconsititué culturellement, 1996).