About
Bio
Sébastien Clermont (Satin Bees) is a Montreal-based visual artist whose work draws from myth, deep ecology, and the unconscious. His practice began in Mexico, where encounters with local art and ritual practices catalyzed a deep engagement with painting. Since then, his path has led him through residencies, murals, and exhibitions across Colombia, Guatemala, Spain, Japan, and Canada. His imagery explores the dissolution of boundaries—between self and other, body and world—giving rise to shapeshifting figures and archetypal visions. Rooted in intuitive process, Sébastien’s art seeks to reveal the hidden threads connecting humans, nature, and the ineffable forces that move through both. He is also the creator of The Shapeshifting Tarot, a deck that extends his visual language into the realm of divination.
Artist Statement
Through my work, I explore the underlying connections between humans and their environment, and how myths and symbols can help us map these links. My artistic process of playing with these ideas leads to images that blossom from a place rooted in the unconscious mind. Subject and object often merge in my work, the dissolution of boundaries being a motif I continually turn to as a representation of the relationship between our bodies and the myriad of other entities that pass through us, whether it is microorganisms or ideas.
We are porous after all, and the shapeshifting figures in my work are an exaggeration of this fragility I see in the construct of a unified, impenetrable individual self. Painting is a process in which I seek to step out of the way and let archetypal images emerge through the material. My interest lies in using art as a method of inquiry into the truths about our nature that can only be approached through the ineffable. I believe art shouldn’t be explained, but understood as an immediate experience.
It is, for me, a process of discovery and a relationship with a source of meaning that lies beyond the individual, and slowly reveals itself through the image. By asking these visual questions I seek to come closer to an understanding of the thread that runs through human psyches, animal bodies, mycelial networks, the animate force of nature, and reality as a whole.
