Originally from the Laurentians, Geneviève Dagenais is a sculptor based in Montreal. Supported by the Dale & Nick Tedeschi Studio Arts Fellowship and the Graduate Studio Arts Advisory Committee Award, she is currently pursuing her Master of Fine Arts (Sculpture and Ceramics) at Concordia University. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Visual and Media Arts from the Université du Québec à Montréal (2022), where she received the Thomas Corriveau and Mario Côté Award of Excellence, as well as a scholarship from the Faculty of Arts Fund. Her work was presented at Artch in 2021, where she received the Loto-Québec People's Choice Award, and at Arprim (2022), where she won the Albert-Dumouchel Emerging Artist Award. His work has been supported by the CALQ – Conseil des arts et lettres du Québec and exhibited in multiple group exhibitions, notably at Circa Art actuel, Centre d'art Diane Dufresne, Espace sensible in Gatineau, Place des Arts in Montreal and Livart.
In 2024, she presented her work at Galerie Cache as part of the exhibition À marées latentes, a duo exhibition with artist Alice Zerini-Le Reste. She presented her most recent research in her first solo exhibition , Ombre portée, at the Musée d'art contemporain de Baie-Saint-Paul (June 21, 2025 - September 7, 2025).
Crédit Photo. Mathilda Rubio
Sculptor Geneviève Dagenais explores the notions of imprint and transmutation primarily through ceramics and textiles. She is interested in the sensory, emotional, and symbolic weight of these mediums, associated with domestic life and feminine knowledge, in order to evoke a visceral experience of objects. Her practice is based on an embodied relationship with the material, where the body acts simultaneously as a tool, a measure, and an emotional space.
Inspired by somatic and feminist constructivist approaches, Geneviève develops a close dialogue between the sculptural object and the body. Her sculptures, with their anthropomorphic properties, establish analogies with anatomy through folds, tensions, envelopes, and cavities. These forms, poised between figuration and abstraction, question how the feminine "I" exists and is constructed within social, physical, and political space. Through the object, she situates our relationship to gravity, weight, pressure, and balance.
Her works act like sensitive bodies, bearing traces, vulnerability, and memory. By engaging tactile, kinesthetic, and proprioceptive perceptions, she activates bodily memory, drawing us into an experience that is both physical and emotional.
By manipulating materials in their transient states—between rigidity and malleability, permanence and ephemerality—she uses sewing and molding to capture the imprint of gestures and passages. These processes make visible the transformations of matter and bear witness to what is lost, persists, and is transformed. Inscribed in the fragility of surfaces, the traces of material transformations reveal a close relationship between body, matter, and memory.
Geneviève's work thus lies at the intersection of the phenomenology of perception, somatic approaches and an affective thought of the object, where matter acts as a space for the inscription of the female body, time and affect.