Yolande Bernier lives and works in Saint Jacques de Leeds, where she has devoted herself to her practice since a university education in the 1970s. Over the years, she has presented around thirty solo exhibitions and participated in various collectives, here and in abroad. Active in her community, until 2020 she ran workshops for school audiences as part of Culture at School. In 2013, she finished with Nihonga, a master's degree from Laval University, with a distinction of excellence.
Forty years ago, in 1981 in Japan, then over several stays, she discovered and adopted an ancient painting process, the Nihonga, the engine of her research and her artistic production. The support used for this medium is mainly Japanese long-fiber paper, mounted on wood. Mineral pigments and the use of gold and silver leaf particularize the material rendering of the surface of the works. With a certain mastery, she cooks powdered precious and semi-precious stones, colors of the earth's crust, with an animal resin as an organic binder.
The language of the works contains vegetal references, in a space where microcosm and macrocosm merge. In different formats, in the intimacy of the works, the light plays on the material surface of indigenous spaces, vegetation or floral filigree, inviting the gaze to scrutinize the material-color. To echo an oriental philosophy, supported by the earth sciences, it updates a foreign traditional process which nourishes the process of creation in an anhistorical and transcultural way.
Yolande BERNIER 
