Monique Girard is a Montreal born visual artist. Since 1982, she has been in the Eastern Townships, living in Fitch Bay and working in Sherbrooke. In 1995, she completed her M.A, in Fine Arts at the Université du Québec à
Montréal (UQAM). In 1971, after one year session as an apprentice at l'Ecole des arts décoratifs de Paris (France), she came back home to study. She obtained, in 1974, her B.A. in Fine Arts in the section "gravure/éducation" at the UQAM.

Since 1990 she has had 18 solo exhibitions and she participated in more than thirty collective ones. For ten years now, painting and the human body have been guiding her quest in the visual arts. The setting up of her paintings grouped in polyptic form, punctuated by molten glass imprints, combinations of pots etc., all point in one direction: the urgent necessity for humanity to avoid its collective suicide brought by the outrageous presence of the deterioration of ideas, the pollution of Earth and the exhaustion of the life resources of the world. The very materiality of her work, whether through the lyrism of colour, or the irony of form, never escapes the urge for a possible survival.

Several works of hers belong to private and public collections. Among them Le Cri, an eight canvas polyptic, which comes from the Cycle de vie et de mort 2: L'Enfance, selected by the Sherbrooke Museum of Fine Arts for its permanent collection. This work was chosen for its capacity to illustrate well the pictorial language of both Cycle de vie et de mort 1 and 2 : Origine and L'Enfance, amidst a total of 88 paintings. Roundtables and performances in collaboration with choreographer Brigitte Graff have contributed to convey the ideas of the works which have been exhibited in Sherbrooke, in Montréal, and elsewhere. Monique Girard has produced in situ works for the Centre d'Arts Orford. In the context of the Circuit des Arts du Memphrémagog, she created a mural dyptic, Les poseuses de lunes, l'envers des femmes, at the Relais de l'Abbaye, an inn near Magog. In the same setting, during Summer of 1999, on the theme L'envers des hommes, corps de lune au masculin, she painted 4 pannels integrated in the architecture of the outdoor balcony of the same inn. And during the summer of 2000 in the same place, she created «Points d'exclamation ...rêves!» a collection of 7 triptyques.

Newspaper articles, exhibition catalogues testify to her work. Monique Girard taught visuals arts in primary and secondary schools during fifteen years. She is an active member of the Regroupement des artistes des Cantons de l'Est (RACE), of the Regroupement des artistes en arts visuels (RAAV), and during ten years she was editor in chief of L'Oeil Nu, RACE's three issues a year periodical. In 1998 she received a grant from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec for the production of Cycle de vie et de mort 3: Les orifices . This work is scheduled for exhibition, first in Sherbrooke in March 2000, and then in Montréal in the Fall. For this production, whose theme is the circulation of meaning via our senses, Monique Girard decided to prize a close collaboration with different creators, Brigitte Graff in dance, Allyn Harris in musical composition, Stéphane Fiore in photography, in order to try to transcend some of our human feelings in their challenge for survival.

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