Chantal Rossi, Ville de Montréal Associate Councillor for Culture, Heritage and Design, today presented the 2014 Phyllis Lambert Design Montréal Grant to Émilie F. Grenier, a narrative-experience designer and graduate of London’s Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design.
Grenier received the grant, which is awarded annually by the City of Montréal to recognize and promote the talents of emerging Montréal designers, at a ceremony held at Montréal City Hall and attended by Phyllis Lambert. Grenier will use the $10,000 grant award to create a collection of urban narrative objects that will affect a dialogue between two UNESCO Creative Cities, Montréal and Reykjavik, Iceland.
“The grant recipients are true ambassadors of Montréal creativity and I want to thank them for their participation,” noted Rossi. “For the first time this year, the award acknowledges a multidisciplinary project that combines design and literature by encouraging forward-looking networking between Montréal, a UNESCO City of Design, and Reykjavik, a UNESCO City of Literature.”
Grenier is an impassioned designer of narrative experiences, a process of exploratory creation that draws from all design disciplines with an eye to telling stories, provoking reflection, and stirring emotions. She will be packing her bags next February for a study trip to Reykjavik, where she will meet with emerging creators who are part of Iceland’s effervescent design and literature communities, and study ways in which local materials can be used to tell stories—those of local authors but also those of their city. She will also investigate the canon of contemporary Nordic texts and the material specificity of the Icelandic urban environment. This process will lead to a collection of samples into a materials library, to be shown at the DesignMarch festival in Reykjavik in March 2015.
After a month’s stay in Iceland, Grenier will return to Montréal to continue her research and validate the approach developed in Reykjavik. She will pay particular attention to potential common grounds between these two members of the UNESCO Creative Cities Network, and how to engage dialogue between them. The materials library will be enhanced as a result, and an initial collection of narrative objects emblematic of Montréal–Reykjavik will be created and shown in Montréal.