Pauline Loctin

Pauline Loctin was born in a rural town in central France, where she watched her mother paint, draw and sculpt at home. “She doesn’t like when I say that, but she’s a beautiful artist,” says Loctin, whose main creative practice was music, before she was gifted a book on paper folding when she was in her 30s. She’s now based in Montréal, where she uses hand folding and origami techniques to create large-scale paper installations. 

Pauline Loctin in her studio

As a paper artist and artistic director, Loctin’s practice moves skilfully between two spheres that few artists balance successfully: the art world and the world of retail design. In addition to exhibitions at the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal and during Art Basel Miami, Loctin has designed paper sculptures for clients such as Bentley, DeSerres, Holt Renfrew and Veuve Clicquot. Her installations transform the spaces of the atriums and windows of major shopping centres, and Loctin knows how to work the advantages of some of the most overlooked and publicly accessible exhibition spaces available. 

Pauline Loctin, Coral, 2021. Paper, Plexiglass, 762 x 670 x 670 cm. PHOTO: BRUNO DESTOMBES, COURTESY OF PAULINE LOCTIN.

Since the 18th century, window displays have been sites of artistic expression that use handcrafted installations to market mass-produced goods — hand-painted one-of-a-kind set pieces consistently used to get customers through the front door, to sell the fantasy of uniform luxury goods. Loctin’s paper installations mirror this contradiction, by attracting viewers through the allure of the handmade, while maintaining geometric precision that almost appears machine-made.

Over the last decade, fashion exhibitions have consistently broken attendance records at museums around the world. The Met Museum’s Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination “set a new record for visitor numbers for the museum, exceeding Treasures of Tutankhamun which had held the title since 1978.” [1] As these exhibitions increase in popularity, they have provided opportunities for fashion houses to reach new audiences, and for contemporary artists and fashion designers to create parallel programming. Recently, Loctin’s work was included in the critically acclaimed Princess Diana: Accredited Access Exhibition in Los Angeles and Chicago, which featured paper interpretations of Princess Diana’s hats to accompany images by royal photographer Anwar Hussein. Some installations worked “like a pop-up book”; others included over 200 pieces, created through lasercutting, folding, and various sculptural techniques. 

Loctin also created paper backdrops for suited mannequins in Coutourissime, a retrospective exploring the work of the late French fashion designer Thierry Mugler. With paper, “it’s the same folding that you use in fashion to do pleating,” she says. In 2021, she visited two maisons de plissage in Paris — one of which prepares pleated textiles for Chanel — and the experience made her “want to explore more material than paper” in the future. Treating paper like textiles, her elegant sculptural installations recall the wearable work of haute couture designers and milliners, and replicate those forms in paper. 

Pauline Loctin, Pli.é Project, 2018. Paper, 91 x 91 x 30 cm. (folded) PHOTO: MELIKA DEZ, COURTESY OF PAULINE LOCTIN.

Loctin uses formal origami techniques — such as tessellation, the repetition of a hand-folded motif — alongside more freestyle sculpture techniques for creating curved folds. The resulting geometric forms are mechanically uniform with a rounded sculptural elegance that makes viewers question what paper can and can’t do.

Depending on the site and commission, her installations may take inspiration from coral reefs, sand dunes or the visual language of ballet. With a strong visual memory for her environment, Loctin finds her inspiration “in mushrooms, in fish, in air — there’s so much pattern in this world.” Her work often acts as a grand, abstract illustration of a very simple point of inspiration, articulated through repeated folds. 

The Pli.é Project, for example, is a photo series of ballet dancers from six renowned dance companies wearing pleated paper costumes, which acknowledges that the French word for “folded” is used both in relation to paper and ballet. This conceptual simplicity is consistent across Loctin’s body of work, which reaches the masses through grandiose scale and universal appeal. She looks for the fil rouge, the common thread, across disciplines and cultures, saying, “There are a lot of links in between Islamic arts and the tessellation in Japan, there’s so much connection in between culture.” Every fil rouge takes on the risk of oversimplifying the elements it threads together, and the conceptual simplicity of Loctin’s work does not always reflect the complexity of its subject matter.  

As an artist who creates fine art installations for commercial spaces, Loctin exposes her work to critical mass viewership. In 2020, she was commissioned by Yorkdale Shopping Centre to create a hanging installation inspired by Chinese lanterns for Lunar New Year. As a non-Asian artist with paper folding expertise, was Loctin the most appropriate artist to accept this commission? On one hand, mall-goers may have dismissed the installation as holiday decor, and this commercial commission may not warrant a critical eye.

On the other hand, art installations in Toronto malls have historically been known to pivot the direction of the national arts scene. In 1982, the Ontario High Court of Justice ruled in favour of artist Michael Snow, who sued the Eaton Centre staff for putting Christmas bows on his Canada geese installation in their atrium [2]. This case set the precedent for the formal recognition of the artist’s moral rights six years later, in an amendment to the Copyright Act of Canada. Ultimately, multiple levels of government agreed that a mall does not have the right to co-opt an artwork as its seasonal decor. The artworks exhibited in shopping centres are perhaps subject to some of the most critical spectatorship; their shortcomings gain that same visibility. 

Mall installations challenge artists to create within the confines of capitalist spectacle, and to prioritize the general public over traditional art gallery viewers. As cities continue to deprioritize non-commercial public spaces, malls become the commons, an artistic testing ground for public engagement. Loctin’s work embraces the opportunity presented in these spaces, and due to the familiarity of her materials, and the nostalgia of childhood paper-based activities, she is able to appeal to audiences of all ages. Creating handmade objects with machine-made precision, Loctin embraces the opportunities afforded by commercial venues, while accepting the risk of her work being absorbed by them. 

[1] Olivia Pinnock,.“The Growing Popularity Of Fashion Exhibitions,” Forbes, March 14, 2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/oliviapinnock/2019/03/14/the-growing-popularity-of-fashion-exhibitions/. “Ranked: The Top Ten Most Popular Shows in Their Categories from around the World,” The Art Newspaper, March 26, 2018. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2018/03/26/ranked-the-top-ten-most-popular-shows-in-their-categories-from-around-the-world.
[2] Martha Langford, Michael Snow: Life and Work (Toronto: Art Canada Institute, 2014), 29.

This article was originally published in the Spring/Summer 2022 issue of Studio Magazine.