Jeannie Thib was born in North Bay, Ontario, Canada in 1955 and received a BFA from York University, Toronto, in 1979.  She has exhibited in Europe, the USA, Mexico, Cuba and widely across Canada. Her work is represented in numerous public and private collections including The National Gallery of Canada, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal, and The Washington DC Convention Center, USA. Thib has been commissioned to create permanent public artworks for the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre, Toronto, the Esplanade Arts and Heritage Centre, Medicine Hat, Alberta and the City of Toronto's Downsview Memorial Parkette among others. Awards include residencies at the Canada Council Paris Studio in France and Stichting Kunst and Complex in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Jeannie Thib is represented by Leo Kamen Gallery, Toronto and Joan Ferneyhough Gallery, North Bay, Canada.

Ornament serves as a vehicle for the examination of a group of interrelated concerns in my installations, sculptures, print works and drawings. Patterns are intrinsically hybrid forms - amalgamations of influences from disparate locations and time periods. Their glyphs function as coded texts - ciphers whose meanings hover just below the level of consciousness. Patterns may result from the impulse to order, but repeated designs based on stylized natural motifs also reveal the anxiety underlying that structure and expose a potentially fraught relationship with nature. Symmetry, beauty and repetition, while initially alluring can eventually overwhelm and confine. Repetition engages with processes of reproduction and replication, both mechanical and natural, as well as with the relation of the copy and the model to concepts of aura and originality.

To explore these connections between hybridity, order, nature, the sign and the model, ornament is reconfigured and repositioned in various ways in my work. Pattern elements are dissected, pulled apart and the collected parts reordered. Historical designs, altered through magnification and repetition, are remade in altered forms using industrial materials. Invading foreign bodies infiltrate and disrupt printed pattern fields by mimicking the organizational systems of their hosts. Motifs accumulated through cutting and stacking create nets and spills, stepped landscapes and architectural models. Drawings propose three dimensional pattern fragments as built environments. These works invert expected relationships between ornament and architecture, culture and nature, model and original.

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