Artistic Practice
I work with the lens as an instrument of celebration, carving free what endures, what resists erasure
Artistic Practice
Christina Marie Comeau is a Canadian photographer and printmaker working at the intersection of documentary inquiry and fine-art practice. Her work examines how resilience, continuity, and care are enacted within less visible environments and working lives—contexts that often sustain time-honoured, quietly effective responses to social and ecological sustainability. Comeau focuses on small, independently owned businesses as sites of cultural exchange, relational labour, and community cohesion. Through sustained, place-based engagement, she explores the lives and livelihoods of everyday people across urban, rural, agricultural, and coastal settings.
Artistic Approach and Medium
Comeau works primarily with monochromatic images—produced in carbon-based ink and platinum-palladium—not as an act of reduction, but as a research-creation strategy that privileges perception, duration, and material inquiry over chromatic description. By setting aside the immediacy and semantic volatility of colour, the work reframes the photograph as an orchestration of tonal relationships and material presence through which meaning is gradually disclosed. This value-based visual language slows the act of seeing, allowing complexity to emerge through restraint rather than accumulation. In this respect, the work resonates with the perceptual discipline and quiet tension found in the magical realism of Canadian painters such as Alex Colville and Christopher Pratt, where ordinary scenes are rendered as sites of heightened awareness rather than spectacle. Through monochrome, the photograph becomes an instrument of inquiry—inviting reflection, interpretive pause, and the emergence of alternative understandings grounded in lived experience rather than visual excess.
Artistic Focus and Current Work
Comeau's practice privileges sustained engagement and ethical representation over event-driven imagery. At its core is an ongoing inquiry into Resistance to Erasure—a theme grounded in her Acadian ancestry and shaped by histories of displacement, continuity, and quiet perseverance. She attends to the tension that emerges when the built environment is situated within the vastness of organic reality, where habitual gestures and working spaces that structure neighbourhood life and carry cultural memory are held within broader rhythms of land, sky, and ocean.
Her prints are intended as a form of quiet resistance against the loss of cultural knowledge and ecological awareness. In this way, Comeau’s photography preserves not only what it depicts, but also what it makes possible: an attentiveness to what endures, and to the everyday forms of care through which sustainability is lived—locally, relationally, and with a deeply poetic persistence.
Exhibitions
Continental Fragments: Group Exhibition, La Petite Mort Gallery, Ottawa, Canada, 2010
Resistance to Erasure: Group Exhibition, Passage Gallery, Ottawa, February-April 2026
Four Corners: Group Exhibition, SPAO Gallery, Ottawa, November 2026
Publication
Publication in Sentinel magazine, the National Magazine of the Canadian Forces, 1992
Collections
Prints held in private collections
Photographic Training
2021 Pizography Printmaking and Digital Negative development, Cone Editions, Vermont, USA
2023 Platinum-Palladium Printing, Malde-Ware method, Cone Editions, Vermont, USA
2024 Masterclass with Pradip Malde, co-inventor of the Malde-Ware platinum-palladium printing-out method
2025 Project Development, School of the Photographic Arts: Ottawa
2026 Artist-in-Residence, School of Photographic Arts, Ottawa
Education
2020 Master of Arts in Leadership, Royal Roads University
2023 PhD Candidate, University of Waterloo, School of Environment, Resources, and Sustainability