Maude Arsenault (1973, Canada) is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in Montreal. She has been a photographer for over thirty years and holds a MFA in visual and media arts from UQAM and a certificate in art history from Université de Montréal.
At the intersection of photography, performance, sculpture, installation, and the artist's book, her practice explores the relationships between female bodies, the spaces they inhabit, and the narratives they convey. Rooted in feminist thought, her work focuses on what bodies carry: inherited gestures, memories, traces, and transformative capacities. The concept of the fold runs through her work, both as a physical gesture and a symbolic space: folding, unfolding, wrapping, and crumpling become ways of exploring what leaves its mark on bodies and materials, what remains buried, and what can be reactivated. The fold thereby serves as a kind of memory, but also as a space for resistance and reinvention. Her latest research also examines the relationship between the body and territories from an eco-feminist perspective.
“During my residency at Centre SAGAMIE, I seek to further my exploration of photographic printing on textiles and their transformation into three-dimensional sculptural forms by means of solidification processes. Using folds, movement, and the metamorphosis of image and material, I will examine how bodies bear the marks of time and the climatic, hormonal, social, identity-related, and political upheavals that affect them.”
Maude’s work has been exhibited at Paris Photo, Kyotographie, SHOW L.A., Écho 119 (Paris), Galerie C (Neuchâtel, Switzerland), as well as at MAC BSP, Projet Casa, Espace DÈS, and Occurrence in Montreal. The artist has completed residencies at the Banff Centre, Les Récollets (Paris), Diaphane (France), the Benrido Studio in Kyoto, as well as at the NARS Foundation and EFA in New York City.
The author of the books Entangled and Resurfacing (Deadbeatclub), she has notably received the Hariban Grand Prize (2020), the Yvonne L. Bombardier Fellowship (2021), and the Claudine and Stephen Bronfman Fellowship in Contemporary Art (2023).
