Libby Hague

Libby Hague is a Toronto-based printmaker. Her curiosity and inventiveness have in-formed a hybrid practice involving creation of large, immersive print installations through which she examines social relationships in our precarious world. 

Her recent endeavours have incorporated exploratory translation of augmented reality (AR) based visual vocabulary into analog artistic disciplines. Her contributed spring issue to the 2022 Smokestack Quarterly demonstrates further development of these investigations. Describing the creative process of her sugar lift aquatint Conga, Libby shares:

[Through participation in a recent project] I was introduced to AR – a strange and slippery 3D world where solids move through one another with the ease of imagination. The profound strangeness of AR inspired a series of watercolours (a more agile medium than the woodcuts I usually do). I painted with a quick brush to keep pace with the small dancers, blending the naive and the erotic, exploring  ideas of transformation and sexuality.

Having worked on watercolours  for several months, when the opportunity arose to work with Laine on a small etching,  I was happy to agree. I wanted to  discover how my ideas would transform in intaglio [printmaking]. As a printer, I also wanted to  see what it’s like to work with another. I was lucky;  I found it to be both a luxury and a lesson (I will now buy clean felts). Laine is a gifted, careful, focused and preternaturally optimistic printer.  The process has been a pleasure!

Hague holds an RCA, BFA (honors) degree from Concordia University, MTL, and is a member of Open Studio in Toronto. Hague has shown her work across Canada and internationally. Select presentations include a retrospective exhibition, The past is never over, Art Gallery of Mississauga, ON; Every Heart can Grow Bigger: make room, O.D.D. Gallery, Dawson, YT; Every Heart can Grow Bigger, Gallery Stratford, ON; On this Wondrous Sea, Karachi Biennale, Pakistan; International Print Triennial, Krakow, Poland; Over the Horizon, Open Studio, ON, and most recently MOVEMENT Toronto<>Vienna, The Artificial Museum and PixFilmCollective.