ABOUT
Ciara Jayne Linteau is a Canadian artist whose practice spans ceramics, installation, video, and digital media. Working through material investigation and research, she examines the relationships between craft, resource extraction, labour, and technological systems.
Her recent work centres on cobalt, tracing its movement from ceramic pigment to a critical mineral used in contemporary energy infrastructure and computing. Through sculptural objects, moving image, and digital experiments, Linteau investigates how materials connect geological processes, industrial histories, and the systems shaping contemporary life. Alongside her artistic practice, Linteau has worked in museum collections and heritage institutions since 2009. Her experience in collections management, documentation, and preservation informs an ongoing interest in how objects accumulate meaning, how histories are recorded, and what survives as materials and systems change.
Based in Alberta's Bow Valley, Linteau holds an MFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Her practice brings material histories into dialogue with questions of environmental change, technological development, and the infrastructures through which resources circulate.
ARTIST BIO
Ciara Jayne Linteau is a Canadian artist working across ceramics, installation, video, and digital media, based in Alberta's Bow Valley. Her research-informed practice explores the relationships between material histories, resource extraction, labour, and technological systems, with a particular focus on cobalt and its movement from ceramic pigment to a critical mineral in contemporary energy infrastructure and computing. Linteau has worked in ceramics for over two decades and has taught in Banff and Canmore for nearly twenty years. Alongside her studio practice, she brings extensive experience in museum collections and heritage institutions, informing her interest in how objects are made, documented, preserved, and understood over time. Her work is held in public and private collections across Canada, Australia, and the United States, including the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and the Sir Elton John Collection. She holds an MFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My practice begins with materials and the histories they carry. Working across ceramics, installation, video, and digital media, I investigate how materials connect craft, resource extraction, labour, and technological systems. Cobalt is a central focus of this work. Familiar as a ceramic pigment, it also circulates through the industrial infrastructures that support contemporary energy and computing. Following cobalt between these contexts allows me to examine how materials accumulate value, how their histories become obscured, and how the consequences of extraction are distributed across people, environments, and systems. Through material experimentation, sculptural forms, and digital processes, I bring these relationships into view. Clay is both a material and a way of thinking: it holds geological time, records transformation, and makes visible the instability of structures we often assume will endure. My work considers what materials can reveal about the systems that shape them, and what remains when those systems change, fail, or leave their consequences behind.