Alyce Soulodre

Department:

Sales Associate, Art Noise store

Favorite product:

watercolour paint tubes and bamboo panels

Bio:

Alyce Soulodre is a self-taught artist working primarily with watercolour, pen and ink, and coloured pencil. She has always been fascinated by creatures and plants of all kinds and continues to be inspired by the world’s beautiful biodiversity. This appreciation is reflected in her choice of subjects, which often includes various flora and fauna. She is also inspired by pop culture, especially films, and loves to create tributes to her favourites. She studies creepy creatures in her work as a Ph.D. Candidate in English at Queen’s University, where she explores the depictions of bugs and entomologists in Victorian horror and mystery fiction. Her work has been featured at the Juvenis Festival (2021, 2022), the Oddities show at Minotaur (2022), the Trellis Queer Art Show (2022), and previously at the Art Noise Gallery in the Show of Smalls (2022). She lives and works on unceded Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabek territory.

Statement:

These pieces are part of an ongoing series of work on Tri-Art bamboo panels featuring animals paired with florals, part of which I’ve previously shown at Art Noise’s Show of Smalls (2022). In this collection, I’ve featured various creepy crawlies adorned with flowers as part of my personal and academic interest in drawing attention to these often overlooked and maligned creatures. I love allowing the bare bamboo to show around the painting in order to emphasize the sense of a natural environment cohesive with the pieces’ subjects. Although it’s branching out from my usual watercolour, I find that Tri-Art’s acrylic gouache is the perfect matte paint to play with on this surface, and I’ve also used their sludge gesso as a primer. I hope that this collection highlights the beauty to be found in these wondrous creatures.