Ariane Beauchamp | Rooted Memory
Sept 12 – 26

Reception: Sept 12, 3–5 pm, artist talk @ 3:45 pm
RSVP your attendance to responses@wallspacegallery.ca

Presales are open Saturday, Sept 5 @ 10 am, in-person, e-mail and via phone at 613-729-0003. If you would like to preview an artwork before collecting it, please contact the gallery at info@wallspacegallery.ca

Wall Space Gallery is pleased to present Rooted Memory, a new series by Ottawa-based artist Ariane Beauchamp. Working in ink, Beauchamp brings together imaginary birds, vegetation, and places drawn from her own experience to consider the ways memory shapes our relationship to where we belong. Her intricate compositions hold the natural and the personal in close proximity, creating environments that feel at once familiar and difficult to fully inhabit.

In Nipissing, Beauchamp depicts her childhood home within a dense gathering of birds, branches, and foliage. The house is almost absorbed into its surroundings, suggesting the way a place can become inseparable from the memories formed there. In Elsewhere, her current home appears within another intricate landscape. Placing these two houses within the same body of work creates a quiet correspondence between past and present, and between the places that have shaped who we are and the places we are still coming to know.

Throughout the series, birds move through these densely populated environments as individual figures within a larger living system. They are connected to their surroundings without being completely defined by them. This tension reflects the experience of belonging itself: we exist within networks of relationships, memories, and places, while carrying an individual sense of who we are.

Beauchamp’s meticulous ink drawings are built slowly, mark by mark. Nothing can be easily erased; each line remains and becomes part of what follows. The process mirrors the accumulation of memory, where past experiences remain present and continue to influence what comes next.

In Rooted Memory, Beauchamp considers what we carry with us when we leave a place, and what it means to find ourselves within a new one. Her work suggests that belonging may be less about remaining in one place than recognizing the traces of those places wherever we go.

Curator
Haruka Toyoda

Featured works:
Kinship, Mixed media on paper
Withheld, Mixed media on paper