BIOGRAPHY
Originally from Ottawa, Liliane Keeler is a visual artist based on Montreal’s South Shore. She holds a degree in visual arts and art history from the Université du Québec à Montréal and has further developed her mosaic practice through various workshops, courses and residencies in both Montreal and Paray-le-Monial, France. Her multidisciplinary approach combines mosaic, painting, street art and in-situ installation, where material becomes a means to engage with contemporary social and ecological issues. Deeply committed to arts education and community engagement, she has been leading cultural mediation activities for several years, promoting accessibility to art and encouraging citizen participation. She has taken part in the creation of several collaborative mosaic projects in Quebec and Europe, and her work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions in Canada and internationally.
Liliane Keeler has received creation grants from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec as well as the City of Boucherville. She is a professional member of the Regroupement des artistes en arts visuels du Québec, the Mosaic Association of Canada and the International Association of Contemporary Mosaicists. Her work is part of public and private collections in Canada and in France.
ARTISTIC STATEMENT
As a multidisciplinary artist, I explore themes related to memory, vulnerability, and resilience, as well as repair as both a poetic and social act, in dialogue with environmental issues and the human condition. My volunteer work with vulnerable individuals has led me to pay close attention to the fractures within our society, nurturing a practice in which art becomes a means of bearing witness, questioning, and symbolically repairing what has been broken.
My background as a fashion designer and seamstress has profoundly influenced my artistic approach. Working with textiles, observing how a garment is constructed around the body—sewing, assembling, mending—these gestures now resonate in my mosaic practice, where fragmentation, assemblage, layering, juxtaposition, and the interplay of textures become a language of their own.
In recent years, my practice has explored the interactions between mosaic, painting, installation, and street art, in dialogue with conceptual art. More than an object, the artwork becomes an embodied idea, where memory, fragility, and repair unfold through process, space, and the viewer’s experience. In parallel with this approach, I investigate the conceptual dimension of mosaic, a craft technique I practice with traditional tools—wooden block, hammer, pliers—and classical materials such as marble, ceramics, smalti, and glass tesserae. To this, I add the integration of contemporary, repurposed, or recycled elements to which I give a second life. This savoir-faire allows me to subtly connect forms, textures, dimensionality, and nature. My artistic practice thus becomes a field of experimentation where materiality and traces of time converge.
My work also extends into public space through in situ interventions, where mosaic becomes an act of repair. By filling sidewalk cracks with fragments of materials, I create ephemeral works that question gestures of care and our relationship to the urban landscape.