Yvonne Lammerich was born in Germany, lived and worked in England from 1973 to 1978, in France intermittently between 1978 and 1984 and Canada from1973 to 1984 where she now has lived since 1985. She is currently based in Prince Edward County, Ontario.
Her exhibition career includes the upcoming 2017 Canadian sesquicentennial project 2017-1967 at Harbourfront galleries in Toronto. She designed and constructed Red Pond between 2013 and 2015; The Ideal House Project with Ian Carr-Harris at Susan Hobbs Gallery in 2013; TMCA proposal: Everywhere and Nowhere at Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, Toronto, 2011. Her works exhibited internationally including Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, MOCCA, Toronto; the Nunnery Gallery, London, UK; Musée des Beaux Arts de Montréal; Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge, Alberta; Nature in the Garage International Project, Toronto; 1st Quebec International Biennale; les Brasseur ASB Liege, Belgium; Musée du Quebec; La Cite des Arts, Paris; Musee du Quebec, Quebec City; International Artists Centre, Poznan, Poland; Gallery Clara Maria Sels, Dusseldorf, Germany; Maison des Congres et Culture, Clermont-Ferrand, France; Goethe Institute, Toronto; and Architectural Association, London UK.
Her work is included in public collections of the Musée du Quebec, Musée de Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke, Quebec; Musée de Beaux Arts, Montreal; Art Bank, the Canada Council; Kitchener Waterloo Art Gallery, Ontario; Art Gallery of Algoma, Sault St. Marie, Ontario; and the Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, Ontario.
Her public commissions include Brick Works for the Toronto Transit Commission in 2013; Writing to You, Concord Pacific, Vancouver 2007; Spheres, Aeroports de Montreal, Dorval; Response-Ability Banque Royale, Place Ville Marie, Montreal, 1994; CLSC, Pierre Fonds, Montreal, Quebec, Commande.
She also holds an A.O.C.A from OCAD University and a PhD in Art History from UQAM in Montreal. She was Artistic director for the 1991 international Baie Saint Paul Painting Symposium. She has taught at York University, the Ontario College of Art, the University of Lethbridge and at Zayed University (UAE). In Montreal she was on the Board of Optica as board member and president 1986 – 1993.
She has written reviews for Parachute, Vie Des Arts, ETC, Canadian Art, Contemporary Magazine (UK) as well as numerous catalogue essays.
1996 she was awarded the Maria Stafford Mid-Career Prize administered by the Canada Council. In 1994 she was awarded Minister des Affaires Culturelle Studio in Paris residence. She holds numerous grants from the Canada Council, the Ontario Council, Ministere des Affaires Culturelle and the British Arts Council.
Yvonne Lammerich & Ian Carr-Harris, Six Records of a Floating Life 1763-2016, pavilion architecture & installation, 2016
Yvonne Lammerich & Ian Carr-Harris will build a pavilion that takes Chinese classical memoir of Shen Fu Six Records of a Floating Life inspiration and structural model. Shen Fu’s book is one of the most popular classical writings in China which tells a life story of love, lost, and the writer’s lonely travel after the death of his beloved wife Yun. The story happened in Qing Dynasty, and the writer brings us into the intimate and private space of an ideal but tragical couple in Suzhou. Lammerich & Carr-Harris find that Coleridge and Shen Fu were contemporaries to one another, and both had in common a capacity for the enjoyment and celebration of everyday pleasure.
The pavilion that two artists designed is conceived as a contemporary commentary of the Western’s allusion of exotic China, and a reflection on borrowing forms of Chinese architecture and its visual effect and aesthetic experience in the West. It is six-sided, consists of six sections, so each will correspond to a record of Shen Fu’s book.Moreover, the artists also find that Shen Fu used Tang Dynasty poet’s Li Bai’s verse "a floating life is but a dream”, which is seemingly another version of Coleridge's "Vision in a Dream”. The artists want to present this dream-like quality in their pavilion.They use highly polished stainless steel as main material of the pavilion, so it will reflect both people and environment, create a real-and-unreal experience for viewers, and inspire the feeling of life is a floating dream that is all the same for people live in contemporary time and those in ancient time. The pavilion is like a sanctuary for people to meditate their inner spaces.