PÉTRICHOR | 35th Graduating Cohort Exhibition at Espace VERRE

We warmly invite you to the opening reception on Tuesday, June 19th at 6 p.m. 

From June 9 through September 4, 2026, the Espace VERRE gallery will present PETRICHOR, the exhibition featuring the 35th group of graduates of the fine crafts – glass option program, offered in collaboration with Cégep du Vieux Montréal. After three years of studying, discovering, and exploring the various glass art techniques, this event will mark the professional debut of Alexanne Cadieux, Chantale Couture, Lénaïc Duros, Sarah Fournier, Geneviève Grenier, Justine Lafrance, and Caitlyn Wong Cheong.

Derived from the Greek petra (stone) and ichor (mythical fluid), the term petrichor is defined as the smell produced when rain falls on dry ground. This imagery serves as the guiding thread of the exhibition: a moment of contact in which latent processes are revealed, where matter—transformed by time and the elements—allows new possibilities to surface.

The artists have delved in an exploration of what emerges after waiting, being tense, or ensuing a transformation. They have utilized glass as a surface of remanence, capable of condensing personal narratives, symbolic imaginaries, and concerns related to living systems. Their artistic approaches are rooted in the observation of natural cycles, material metamorphoses, and relationships between body, environment, and memory. They transmit intimate landscapes with references drawn from nature, the sacred, the fantastical, and cultural heritages, giving rise to a diversity of narratives.

The collective works presented in PETRICHOR testify to strong affirming processes that are nourished by an in-depth knowledge of glass and a desire for both formal and conceptual exploration. The diversity of techniques – blown glass, cast glass, kiln-formed glass, flameworking, assemblage and installation – highlights a high level of technical mastery deployed in the service of varied visual languages.

PETRICHOR thus marks a moment of transition: the passage from an apprentice to a professional practice, and the affirmation of a new generation of glass artists whose research is situated within a contemporary reflection on materiality, the world, and its transformations.