Clare Goulet

Spring ~ 2025

During her time as PAVIA’s Artist (writer) -in-Residence, poet Clare Goulet spent many hours walking the winding trails of the Halifax Backlands (in particular the MacIntosh Run Trail structure) — the wild terrain just beyond these café and gallery walls — observing, listening, and reflecting. Her literary practice, deeply rooted in lyric thinking and hybrid forms, drew her into spaces where science met metaphor, and perception gave way to poetic attention. During her time at PAVIA, she continued to gaze upon the lichen, those ancient, slow-growing organisms clinging quietly to rocks, bark, and exposed soil. Lichen are not just the subject of her most recent book Graphis scripta / writing lichen (Gaspereau Press, 2024), but the beginning of a deeper inquiry — one that asks what it means to truly see, to come close, and to dwell within the overlooked.Clare’s reflections unfold through her writing that is part essay, part fieldwork, part fragment — echoing the complexity of lichen itself. This residency has allowed her to deepen her relationship with place, using the landscape of the Backlands as both muse and collaborator. Inspired by symbiosis, polyphony, and the shared intelligences of ecosystems, Clare invites us into a world where creative and natural systems mirror one another. The work is quiet but charged — it asks us not only to see the micro, but to feel the macro implications of attention, reverence, and layered presence.

Supporting Clare in this residency project are three, local, visual artists whose works similarly draw from the land’s subtle and complex language. Frankie Macauley, a previous PAVIA artist-in-residence, presents abstract, minimalist sculptures made from paper and cardboard — spatial interpretations of the McIntosh Run watershed and the observable shifts in flora and terrain as one moves along its trails. Her geometric forms reference ecological classifications and topographies, offering a meditative response to how we divide and define the natural world.

Jennifer Escott’s full-colour macro photographs offer a complementary intimacy. Taken in the Backlands, her images capture the often-missed intricacies of mosses and lichen — strange, vivid organisms alive with asymmetry and form. Her lens becomes an instrument of reverence, asking viewers to peer in and discover the richness of what lies beneath our feet. Her work embodies a kind of quiet astonishment — not declaration, but invitation.

Jacqueline Steudler brings a different medium to the conversation. Known for her thread sculptures and freehand machine embroidery, these recent works and studies of lichen bridge material memory and organic complexity.

Together, these artists have created a polyphonic field of attention. While each has their own voice, their works echo and respond — a shared terrain that mirrors the lichen they honour: slow, adaptive, symbiotic. Clare Goulet’s time as the PAVIA artist-in-resident is not a particular statement, but an offering. It’s an invitation to pause, to look more deeply, and to see collaboration as a way of being — for the lichen world of the Backlands and for ourselves.

CLARE GOULET

Emma Clare Goulet is a British-Québécoise hybrid raised in Nova Scotia, who works as writer & editor (literary arts and science research)and teaches at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where she directs its Writing Centre.

Scholarly and creative essays, fiction, reviews, mixed-media forms and poems have been published in journals and books in Canada, the US, Ireland, and the UK, including The Fiddlehead, Grain, Room, Dalhousie Review, Collateral, the anthology Listening for the Heartbeat of Being and Lichens of Ireland & Great Britain. With Mark Dickinson, she co-edited the anthology Lyric Ecology.

Her first poetry book, Graphis scripta / writing lichen (Gaspereau Press 2024) is shortlisted for the J.M. Abraham Atlantic Poetry Award. Last summer she created and built the outdoor installation lichen-poem trail Symbiotic at Ross Creek Centre for the Arts on North Mountain, NS). Her new project Closer, on looking, will be released 2026.

artist statement

“Place makes us, or breaks us, or both.” ~ Elizabeth Bishop

Behind all my artistic practice is the fact I’m a British/Québécoise hybrid from a mixed-race family schooled in Nova Scotia and North Staffordshire with a childhood stint in a village in Fleurines, France. So it makes sense that integrated thinking, translations, and hybrid forms are my core interests today. I work as a writer at intersections of art and science, theoretical and embodied, historic and contemporary, analytical and lyric. Research passions are metaphor, symbiosis, polyphony (multi-voiced works), & hybrid scholarly-creative forms.

My books, poems, essays, stories, visual-text and score-text collaborations emerge from a deep, lifelong reading practice--in Greek myth, European fairytale, Canadian poetry, as well as in photographs, fictions, neuroscience and lichenology, wilderness and music. The work of Canadian philosopher-poet-musician Jan Zwicky deeply informs my own, particularly her idea of lyric thinking, “something that for an instant joins the ear, nose, skin tongue, and heart with the eye and the mind.”

I’m currently playing with ideas of space via the sculptures of Giacometti and compositions of Arvo Pärt. Recent subjects are lichen and ways of looking. Lichen were the first organisms discovered to be symbiotic, and--like art and like metaphor--are, as Canadian writer Don McKay says, “puzzles placed in our path to shift our paradigms of thinking and help us into fresh spaces.” If we have the courage.