Lhasa Simard

In her work, Lhasa Simard explores the sublimation of everyday objects through the act of finding. Guided by the serendipity of gathering, she envisions installations where found and created objects interact, always employing a process-oriented approach to sculpture. By engaging with the materiality of forms, the artist replicates pipes, handles, vases, tubes, caps, spouts, and various objects to create modular installations that transform their utilitarian nature. Her works combine references to market gardening and craftsmanship to offer a counterpoint to mass production and overconsumption. Among her favourite techniques are ceramics, glass casting, moulding, and assemblage.

In 2025, Lhasa Simard spent a summer in Acadia working with a vegetable farmer on an organic vegetable farm. This manual, routine, and physically demanding work inspires her to draw parallels between sculptural practice and the gestures of farming, prompting her to recreate certain elements of the garden, such as the irrigation system where tarps are used to cover weeds. However, she crafts these installations using her own resources: garden hoses become ceramic tubes, metal valves are cast in glass, and the once-opaque tarp now holds seeds within its very structure. Moulding found objects allows her to enrich this network, into which material and poetic inconsistencies slip.

During her residency, Simard hopes to continue this research and meet with various farmers in the Cap-Pelé, Matapédia, and Montreal regions to observe how they organize their work. What tools do they use, and what are their repetitive gestures? How do they come together through working the land? These interviews will inform her studio practice, during which she will continue her material explorations of ceramics through casting and assembly.

Biography

Lhasa Simard is a multidisciplinary artist from the Acadian Peninsula in New Brunswick. Having recently completed her bachelor’s degree in visual and media arts at UQAM, she explores installation sculpture through various techniques such as casting, clay work, and glass thermoforming. Her process-oriented experiments reflect a deep curiosity about the emotional connections humans have with objects and traditional craftsmanship. In 2024, she presented a work at the Céline-Bureau members’ exhibition at Espace Loulou, and in 2025, her work was exhibited at the Galerie de l’UQAM during Passage à Découvert. She is the recipient of the Robert-Wolfe Award for Excellence in Visual Arts.

Recent exhibitions

2025	Passage à découvert, group exhibition, Galerie de l’UQAM, Montréal, CA
2024	For the love of the game, group exhibition, Céline Bureau, Espace Loulou, Montréal, CA paramètres XXIII, group exhibition, Place des Arts, Montréal, CA