Biography
Collette Broeders is a passionate mixed media artist merging traditional processes with new media and performance. She is currently located in LaSalle, Ontario residing on the traditional territory of the Three Fires Confederacy of First Nations, which include the Ojibwa, the Odawa, and the Potawatomie. In the 80’s she attended St. Clair College of Applied Arts and Technology for business followed by the University of Windsor for the Bachelor of Commerce program. She worked in accounting, business and database development for several years. By 2004, Broeders returned to the University of Windsor where she completed the Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) program. Her studies focused on printmaking and investigated the digital realm where she combined both of these mediums. She is a founding member of one ten park : a working space, an active member of the arts community and maintains a studio in LaSalle, Ontario, Canada.
Her art practice extends beyond the studio to provide assistance to groups including Mayworks Windsor Organizing Committee, Artcite, Inc., Windsor Feminist Theatre (WFT) and Stone and Sky. She has maintained membership with the Canadian Bookbinders and Book Artists Guild and International Association of Hand Papermakers and Paper Artists. She continues to experiment with community engagement in contemporary art making with additional artistic activities that include public performances as well as papermaking and printmaking workshops in the Windsor-Essex Region.
Her art negotiates margins of abstraction and uses indexical gestures of mark making and mapping that record and measure intervals of time and space. She integrates repetition and systems of order with universal themes involving language, nature and spirituality. As a print artist and papermaker, she connects with the ‘handmade’ and sensory experience of the natural world. In many respects, it is the repetition involved in the creative process itself that motivates her work. The very acts of doing, of experiencing, and producing in themselves evoke a ritual consciousness of some state of change.
Previous awards and grants include community engaged art in collaboration with Windsor Worker Action Centre (WECC), Arts Culture + Heritage Fund (City of Windsor) and Ontario Arts Council (OAC) Exhibition Assistance for both Visual Art and Media Arts/New Media. Her work has been published in INDA 9: 9th International Drawing Annual, Rampike Magazine, and book, “Remembering 9/11 through the eyes of a Printmaker”. She has appeared on interviews with CBC Television, CBC Radio and Bloomfield Television.
She has exhibited nationally and internationally. Selected solo and group exhibitions include: Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, (California), IndexG (Ontario), Whitdel Gallery (Michigan), Calvin College, (Michigan), Artcite, Inc., (Ontario), Thames Art Gallery (Ontario), Crane Museum of Papermaking (Massachusetts), Devos Center, (Michigan), University of Michigan gallery, Work • Detroit, (Michigan), Art Gallery of Windsor (Ontario); Niagara Artist Centre (Ontario), and most recent work includes mixed media installation and performance at Studio Faire (France) and Cedar Ridge Gallery (Ontario).
