Onésime Larivière

Larivière spent nine years on a line-clearing crew for a rural utility on the south shore of the St. Lawrence, and when the old wooden poles between Trois-Pistoles and Matane came down he asked to keep the insulators. He took about three thousand: porcelain bells and aquamarine glass, most of them crazed, a few with a lightning scar burned through the glaze. They are stacked in his shop by note, because he grades them by the sound they make when tapped with a nail and the dead-sounding ones break wrong.

He shatters them inside a canvas sack with a lead-headed hammer, sorts the shards into biscuit tins, and sets them face-down on paper with wheat paste before floating modified mortar across the back. Insulator glaze is too slick to key: his first three panels shed shards for a year, a slow tick of porcelain hitting the floor at night. Now every back is ground on a diamond wheel. A four-metre panel spalled through in the winter of 2011 when the shop froze solid, and he heats the place these days like a man with a grudge.

The panels are river diagrams: current lines, the eddy below Île Verte, the shape of ice going out in April. Nine are set into public buildings, and he takes those commissions because a wall you pass every morning is the whole point of the medium. He buys nothing new, no smalti, no gold leaf, no mirror, and grouts everything in the mortar's own grey, refusing tinted grout in terms that have ended two meetings early. He will not put a face in a mosaic, having seen enough saints in Rimouski.