Lycia Trouton


Lycia Danielle Trouton is a Canadian-Australian-Irish artist. She was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and raised in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Following an early career as an Earth or Land artist, she became a Public Artist with commissions in Seattle, Washington, USA and then rose to international artistic significance with her post-conflict, post-colonial artist-as-witness / peace project: The Linen Memorial. Trouton has held visiting lectureships or done presentations at several higher education institutions, including Malmo Art School of Lund University, FLACSO Ecuador, University of Tasmania and Sheridan College, Toronto.
In 1999, after a visit to Northern Ireland, Trouton received a $5,000 research grant from Canada Council of the Arts to begin researching a textile memorial to those killed in The Troubles of Northern Ireland. After several renamings, the piece would be called the Linen Memorial. The Memorial is a list of almost 4,000 of those who died in 'The Troubles' in Northern Ireland from 1966 to 2009 in a chronological Names List, embroidered on Irish Linen handkerchiefs. The Memorial was publicly unveiled in Ireland at a peace and reconciliation centre on the first Private Day of Reflection, 2007, on the sectarian violence. It formed the basis of Trouton's graduate thesis. It was also shown in Canberra's Design Centre, CraftACT, Australia, 2004, and in 2011 in Portneuf, Quebec, Canada as a part of Quebec's International Biennale of Flax and Linen.

Early life

Dr Lycia Danielle Trouton is a sculptor and the daughter of an architect and an artist who became a special education teacher. She has an older sister MD and grew up in the tree-lined Dunbar-Southlands neighbourhood of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Lycia’s father reportedly named his daughters after the most beautiful cities in the ancient Asia Minor worlds, Lycia in Anatolia. She attended Crofton House School but, while becoming a model student and prefect, privately rebelled as a creative student. At the age of 13, Lycia studied painting, drawing and ceramics at one of the first classes for teenagers at the emerging on Granville Island and Speech Arts/Drama with the mother of CBC’s David Wisdom,. Trouton later went onto pre-college at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, and Otis-Parsons, early 1980s, one of the major art institutions in Los Angeles, California, USA. She also studied at —where Andy Warhol went to school—and under Sculptor Michael Hall, mid-west USA and with Tapestry Weaver Dr Diana , Australia – both published authors and cultural theorists.

Education

Trouton obtained her BFA in sculpture at Carnegie Mellon University, Pennsylvania, U.S.A in 1988 and then her MFA, at Cranbrook Educational Community School of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, U.S.A in 1991. She moved to Australia in 2001 and completed her doctorate in 2005 at the age of 38 at the University of Wollongong, 2001-5. She teaches, exhibits and curates around the world and currently resides in B.C., Canada or Belfast.

Writing by or about the artist