Jocelyn Vache (pronounced Vahsh) was born in Massachusetts, USA.
Although bilingual in English and French, her native language is art. Jocelyn grew up drawing and surrounded by creatives who were sewing, woodworking, painting, weaving macramé, knitting, creating stained glass, cake decorating, and gardening (yes, it’s an art form).
She classifies her work as environmental art, making connections between art and our world. She focuses on nature, science, and the urban landscape, both as subject matter in her paintings and her artmaking material (for example, with foraged fibers or ground brick for pigment). She examines systems, cycles, processes, structures, and ethics through human activity and nature's response or ambivalence.
Jocelyn holds a BA in Communication with minors in Studio Art and French, and a Film Studies Certificate from the University of Massachusetts Amherst; and an MEd in French from the University of Massachusetts Boston.
At the University of Massachusetts Amherst, she had the honor of studying art under Nelson Stevens, who taught her how to see, artistically and soulfully. He encouraged her to skew her lens to express what she saw and to visit the lenses of as many other artists as possible. This launched her desire for a choose-your-own-adventure method to education. She values informal instruction via street art, contemporary exhibitions, and peer interactions. At UMass, she also spent countless hours in the Craft Center teaching herself silversmithing, which she continues today.
She left UMass her junior year to study film and intern in Cannes, France. There, she rubbed elbows with industry professionals, frequented as many art galleries and museums as she could, and crossed the French-Catalan border (by foot - long story) to visit the birthplace of Salvador Dali. She left the European continent to work in London for a summer, finding regular inspiration at her neighboring Camden Market and at the Whitechapel Gallery.
After college, she did gig work around Boston, Massachusetts, USA, in graphic design and as a pottery shop assistant before returning to France and settling into the northern Parisian suburbs to teach for several years. There, she soaked in art vibes at her favorite museum, the Centre Pompidou, and random art squats in abandoned buildings around the capital. Her favorite was one with a toilet placed at the entrance to toss in loose change that the artists split at the end of the day.
Now back in metro Boston, Jocelyn has been facilitating a makerspace and teaching during the school day (languages, visual art, media arts, technology, and urban gardening) while spending her evenings, weekends, and vacations creating in the studio. Her regular informal education destinations are the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Fuller Craft Museum, MIT Museum, RISD Museum, Peabody Essex Museum, and the Attleboro Art Museum, where she is a member. As a committed life-long learner, she continues to take one-off classes in fine art, computer science, green technology, craft, education, and French at local universities (Boston University, Harvard Extension, Lesley University, among others). Out of all the random-yet-connected official certifications she’s acquired, being a LEED Green Associate is perhaps the most practical as she is deeply committed to ecological endeavors.
Jocelyn envisions a world where we all question the permanence and perceived necessary archival trait of art (and our possessions in general). Doesn’t the ephemeral better respect the environment? Shouldn’t we leave no trace and return our creations to the Earth? Can humans practice a circular economy where we apply a life cycle assessment to what we create and consume, and honor the true value of objects, particularly when we extract precious raw materials from the Earth, or worse, fabricate synthetic forever chemicals to create them?
She aims to make sustainable, compostable art, and to offer art prints and objects through verified ecologically responsible -- preferably carbon neutral -- sources. Her concern and commitment to the Earth is reflected in her art. She is drawn to insects, flora and fauna, the urban and industrial, and the intersection of them all. Linear knowledge of artmaking, gardening, music, teaching, problem solving, and life informs her art as she is fascinated by each, but more so when they overlap. Her pieces highlight the micro and macro structures of nature and challenge our perceptions through scale and contrast.
Her work is informed by the nature around the studio replete with colonies of plants and wildlife, like her iconic praying mantis, but equally by the urban environments where she’s lived and worked where nature struggles to reclaim the scars that humans have left on the Earth through secondary succession seen in the cracks of the pavement. She brings her fascination with this interconnectedness to us.
In her practice, she has pivoted away from conventional media such as acrylic paint, plastic markers, and newly mined metal, and now creates with the lowest possible impact. In the studio, she makes her own ink with charcoal from her fire pit or fireplace. She mixes her own paint by grinding (often foraged) earth, pigments, and demolition materials, and combining them with homemade raw soy milk. She paints on cloth, employing a limited palette, focusing on texture, and finishing with stitch (when possible with homegrown fibers like yucca, hemp, and milkweed). Her metal pieces are made from recycled silver and repurposed aluminum. Outside of the studio, she participates in street painting festivals to join a fleeting community of collective creativity, where all the members accept that their creations will be gone in a season. She considers the second highest compliment she could receive, after someone purchasing her artwork, to be that collector's recycling or composting it at the end of its life cycle.
When she’s not making art or facilitating zero waste-influenced student creativity, Jocelyn enjoys doing just about anything with her family, running, eating clean, brewing kombucha, nurturing sourdough starter, mending and sewing clothes, building with wood and repurposed materials, and tending to a modest permaculture garden. Her love language is swapping seeds and baby plants.