Pauline Jacques – a life with the birds 

Since her early childhood, Pauline Jacques has enjoyed working with wood. She has lost count of the number of pieces of furniture she has built over the years for family members and friends: sideboards, antique-style wardrobes, captain’s beds, tables, shelves—always in white pine and using the traditional method of assembly with rafters and mortises.

After retiring from a successful career as a nurse, this native of Beauce, now living in the Eastern Townships, discovered wood carving and learned the craft by taking classes from a master, Richard Caton, for several years. Her first ducks already showed her dexterity, and over the years she has expanded the repertoire of birds that come to life under her hands. She now has more than twenty species: kestrels, blue jays, chickadees, hummingbirds, herons, puffins, mockingbirds, cedar waxwings, goldfinches, owls, and more.

She draws inspiration from the natural world in which she lives and which she observes daily, with or without her binoculars. Each piece requires many hours of work and several tools: from the saw bench and band saw to brushes, knives of various sizes, and the multi-head Dremel, not to mention the original drawing and measuring rulers.

Pauline Jacques’ sculptures are naturalistic in that they faithfully reproduce the characteristics of each bird, in terms of size, proportions, number of feathers, and colors. She prefers to use tupelo, a soft wood native to the banks of the Mississippi River in the southern United States, which has unfortunately become much less accessible since Hurricane Katrina. She therefore also uses a local wood, linden, which nevertheless presents certain difficulties, among other things because of the knots that have to be worked around.

This artist devotes many hours to sculpture, which she considers to be a form of meditation, a way of life, and a hobby. She has often refused to exhibit her work, occasionally agreeing to sell her sculptures for special occasions; she mainly reserves them as gifts for loved ones.

After twenty years of sculpting countless birds, Pauline Jacques recently decided to carve a turtle from a block of linden wood, both for the challenge of the project and the pleasure of exploring something different. But she assures us that she will never stray far from birds, which are so dear to her heart.

Arts-Cultures Massawippi allows her to join other artists and connect with audiences who appreciate her work through the L’Art en jeu exhibition held in 2023 and, in 2024 and 2025, the Artistes en action event, which takes place in the heart of nature on the shores of Lake Massawippi in North Hatley.