Em Hould
Saguenay
Hailing from Quebec City, Em Hould is an emerging artist whose practice consists mainly of drawing, illustration and publishing. They hold a BFA from Concordia University and have been living and working in Saguenay since 2021. Their first book, Terrains fertiles, was published by Éditions Omri (now Le Noroît) that same year.
The artist’s practice takes shape through deliberately subjective interpretations of the world around them, shifting between documentation, distortion, and fiction. Rooted in the community where they live, their approach is driven by a sustained focus on places and the human relationships that play out within them. They seek to bring out latent alternative narratives, sometimes reinforcing a desire for a gentler world, and other times questioning our relationship to dominant narratives.
ENSEIGNE is a micro-publishing project that will bring together a series of pencil drawings depicting the frames of shop signs from closed down stores, using actual abandoned billboards found along the roads of the Saguenay and the North Shore regions. In these images, the spaces normally reserved for store names are filled with silhouettes of trees, fragments of sky, or horizons, transforming these once-functional structures into frames for the surrounding environment.
Coco Simone Finken
Gatineau
A bilingual illustrator, workshop facilitator, and self-employed cultural worker, Coco Simone Finken (an artist of settler/European descent | they·she) is interested in the intersections of labor and mental health, in place-based imaginaries, and in the realities of non-traditional, single-parent, and queer family forms.
They work, raise a family, and live on the never ceded territories of the Algonquin/Anishinabe. Following a career in entrepreneurship in the agri-food sector, they have been working in arts administration for several years and offer workshops in community settings and as an independent facilitator.
“For the RELIER 2.0 project, I will be working on the design and production of a small series of zines that build on research related to mental landscapes and its limits in connection with household chores—specifically, with dishwashing.
Designed as a participatory project, it brings together the spoken and written words of friends and acquaintances who have shared what can be found in the dishpit.”
A launch of Em Hould and Coco Simone Finken’s micro-editions will take place at AXENÉO7 in Gatineau, followed by La Galerie L'Œuvre de L'Autre in Chicoutimi.
