Biography
Andrea Filiatrault is a Canadian contemporary artist based in Baden, Ontario, whose practice spans mokuhanga woodblock printing, papier-mache sculpture, mixed media assemblage, video, and light installation. Her work explores personal history and critically reflects on beliefs and their origins, creating immersive environments that start conversations about cultural memory, colonial narratives, and the complexity of inherited perspectives.
Filiatrault's recent large-scale installation, 'Camping and the Illusion of Emptiness' (2024-ongoing), is an immersive display examining the experience of camping she had as a child in the 1970s and 1980s, addressing colonial narratives about wilderness and the erasure of Indigenous presence from Canadian landscape mythology. The installation is accompanied by thematically related woodblock prints on washi paper, demonstrating how her mokuhanga practice functions as both a standalone medium and a component of larger conceptual projects.
Her mokuhanga prints include 'A Comfortable Place' and 'What Are We Nostalgic for Anyway?,' both printed on washi at nine by seven inches, which explore the tension between comfort and complicity in inherited cultural narratives. Her mixed media assemblage 'Red, Blue, Rise' (2024), measuring thirty by thirty by forty inches, explores the challenges of understanding the beliefs and viewpoints of others when emotion, history, and tradition are sources of conflict.
Filiatrault is listed on the Mokuhanga Magic Mokumap, the international directory of mokuhanga artists maintained by the Belgian mokuhanga research collaboration. She exhibited work in 'Negotiating Culture,' curated by Soheila Esfahani, in Kitchener, Canada in 2024. Her practice represents a distinctly Canadian approach to mokuhanga, using the Japanese printing tradition as one element within a broader investigation of cultural identity and the stories embedded in everyday life.
Key Facts
- Nationality
- 🇨🇦Canada
- Movement
- Contemporary Mokuhanga
- Works Indexed
- 1
Frequently Asked Questions
Andrea Filiatrault is a Canadian contemporary artist based in Baden, Ontario, whose practice spans mokuhanga woodblock printing, papier-mache sculpture, mixed media assemblage, video, and light installation. Her work explores personal history and critically reflects on beliefs and their origins, creating immersive environments that start conversations about cultural memory, colonial narratives, and the complexity of inherited perspectives.
Andrea Filiatrault's work was shaped by the Contemporary Mokuhanga tradition in Japanese woodblock printmaking. Contemporary Mokuhanga: Contemporary mokuhanga (literally "wood-block print") encompasses artists working from approximately 1970 to the present who continue or reinvent traditional Japanese woodblock printing techniques.