Marie-Hélène Turcotte (1971) was born in Joliette, Québec, and has lived and worked in Montréal since 1998. Trained in architecture, she completed a master’s degree in visual arts at Concordia University in Montreal in 2018. She divides her practice between drawing and animated film making. Her drawings build up stroke by stroke, combining the intuitiveness of the evolution of a line with the control that makes figuration possible. They are upsurges, microcosms, universes and phenomena. The animation, their rendering into motion, reveals their poetic potential, their inner structure and the experiential nature of their making.
Her first animated film, The Formation of Clouds, was produced by the NFB in 2010. It is remarkable through the fineness of the lines, favoring evocation over narration. It was screened at several national and international festivals, garnering three prizes and distinctions in 2011, of which the Golden Horseman Animated Film for best animated film, at the Dresden FILMFEST.