Drying atop a desk in the artist Andréanne Godin’s studio on Rue Chabanel are three identical garden trowels, replicas fashioned in matte grey clay.

The original object, a utilitarian version with silver metallic blade and an orange and black handle, is placed nearby, apparently for comparison. These facsimiles of an everyday tool one uses to dig into the earth are indicative of Godin’s artistic process, one moored by a preoccupation with revealing what exists below the surface.

Dressed in dark Levis denims and a pair of grey sneakers, Godin has invited me round for a studio visit, and a candid and sprawling conversation. She has made us a pot of black tea which she serves with homemade candied ginger and spoonfuls of honey.

Godin will spend the next two months as artist-in-residence at Fondation Molinari’s central gallery to create works intended to “resonate with those in the Foundation’s collections,” according to the press release, culminating in a springtime exhibition opening 12 March 2026.

“I thought maybe, I understood maybe,” Godin says hesitantly when I ask her what will come of the residency. “I want to create monochromes that will be big enough to occupy your whole vision when you stand at a certain distance from them. I don’t know if that’s what I’m going to be able to do. But that’s what I want to do.”

At a time when artists of all stripes appear obsessed with the concept of “immersion,” here is one that literally plunges headlong into her work. In the fall of 2024, Godin learned how to freedive and became interested in the ways that we perceive colour while submerged underwater.

Her most recent exhibition entitled 48.312403, -78.048948, presented late last year at Galerie Nicolas Robert, produced among other items a series of wild clay pastel sticks that Godin gathered while freediving at lakes within Quebec’s Abitibi region. She shows me several wooden pallets that were specially constructed to display the pastels, and a handmade chart of colour samples with meticulous marginal notes.

“I never really dove in a lake before with my eyes open,” Godin reveals. “It’s an experience that must be very close to meditation. I could just think that I was going to be surrounded by a colour that you won’t really be able to see. But you’re going to see something. I was thinking of certain pieces of Molinari, like Les Trapèze. They’re not stripes. But there’s something organized on the space.”

Godin exhaustively catalogued every detail of what she saw at various depths with microtonal shades of colour that she gleaned from those dives. She began by testing different ways of layering and saturating the colours on paper, creating a shimmering and vibrational optical effect.

“In red it works less,” she explains. “In yellow, I feel that it really works well.” Godin pulls out a large sketchpad and thumbs through it. “I’m going to start by filling these 30 pages with monochromes created out of different layers of all these different colours,” she tells me.

Godin, 41, grew up in Val-d’Or and moved to Montreal in 2007, obtaining a Master of Fine Arts in Fibres at Concordia University. “The first time I went in an art museum, I was 17,” she says. “I was in CEGEP. But I had already decided that that’s what I wanted to do. I remember being a kid, being five, and wanting to be an artist. The only thing I liked to do was drawing.”

The prestigious Galerie Nicolas Robert has presented Godin’s work for more than a decade, and she has exhibited a number of times there, as well as at Axenéo7 in Gatineau, and Oboro in Montreal, among others. She has held local and international residencies previously, most notably at the Christoph Merian Foundation artist’s studio in Basel, Switzerland, in 2017, and at the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation in Bethany, Connecticut, the previous year.

This past December, Godin was appointed Assistant Professor in the discipline of Image Experimentation at Université Laval, so throughout the next season, she will split her time between a new teaching job and her research-creation residency at Fondation Molinari. “I feel like you get back the energy you put out into the universe, and maybe I put out a little too much energy,” she laughs. “I feel like everything’s up in the air.”

We talk at length about her earliest transcendent encounters, those which started Godin on the path to her current artistic practice. “My youth was very related to enjoying nature,” she says. “I think that’s why now in my work it’s so related to outdoor experiences. Even for this project at Molinari, when I thought about my relationship to landscape, it’s always been the forest.”

Godin recalls vivid childhood memories of blueberry-picking excursions with her father — memories that translated into a sculptural installation called And There, We Walked…, which she exhibited at Nicolas Robert in 2015. The work consists of a porcelain basket filled with blueberries fashioned from natural graphite. The tiny graphite blueberry sculptures become tools in the exhibition to create immense, impressionistic wall drawings.

“I love sculpture,” says Godin, showing me the basket, still half-full of shiny black blueberries. “But I was just thinking, ‘man, I don’t know where to put these things.’ Whenever I make sculptures, they’re usually really small, because I don’t want to have to store them. I love that drawings don’t take up a lot of space, but also somehow take up space,” she says, unfurling a thick paper scroll containing one of the drawings. Her studio transforms into a makeshift art exhibition strewn with random examples from her vast oeuvre.

“I was always working in black and white and then I started to work with monochromes. So, for me, it was just an easy transition. One colour. It was the same thing as working in black and white, even if it was all blue or all red. When you teach it, you have to understand colour at another level. Trying to figure out ways of communicating colour, or impressions, or feelings that I had when I was diving, it’s a very humbling experience. It feels like being in the service of nature.”

Nature, I propose to Godin, is something like the opposite of art: objects self-organize naturally, in contrast to being organized with effort by an artist’s intelligence and intuition.

“I do think that nature organizes things in a way that somehow, if you’re sensitive, or if you stop for a second and look at how it organizes things, can teach you so much about how to organize things in a gallery. What is the relationship with your body as you approach this thing?”

In The World of Perception, the book by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, he writes that, “the things of the world are not simply neutral objects which stand before us for our contemplation […] people’s tastes, character, and the attitude they adopt to the world and to particular things can be deciphered from the objects with which they choose to surround themselves, their preferences for certain colours, or the places where they like to go for walks.”

Evidently, a sustained contemplation of perception colours every object that Godin makes — from sculpture, to drawing, to candied ginger. The ways that Godin senses and reflects and reorganizes the objects in her world reveal what is unseen beneath our own surfaces, just as the shades of clay she trowels from lake beds expose the earth’s intrinsic character. Nonetheless, it is the whimsical hue of experience that seems to motivate her most.

“I’ve always loved closing your eyes and being in the sun and seeing that red,” she muses. “Feeling that you’re embraced. And at night, seeing all of the sparkles when you close your eyes. That’s also fun. This idea of being surrounded and touched by colour is different than the idea of seeing it. It feels like you can touch it somehow.”◼︎

Andréanne Godin is Fondation Molinari’s 2026 Artist-in-Residence.

_{Cover image: 48.312403, -78.048948, Detail. All images photographed for NicheMTL.}