The Soul of Things is an immersive exhibition created by Quebec artist Noémi Bélanger. At the intersection of visual and performing arts, raw matter comes alive to poetically express the sensitive nature of the living.
For the creation of her characters, the artist favors an ancestral and little-known technique: needle felting. This dry-felting method uses specialized, barbed needles to entangle wool fibers and densify the material, building up structural volume.
The artisanal textures left by the passage of thousands of needle pokes in the raw wool remind us that the work is handmade, echoing the human presence behind the labor onto the characters. As a material with an uneven composition, felted wool gives the characters a presence that is both strange and deeply familiar, inviting visitors to inhabit a unique space between the inanimate and the living.
The unique signature of Noémi Bélanger’s work has led her to showcase her pieces in solo exhibitions, notably at the museum of the TOPIC International Puppetry Center in Tolosa, Basque Country (Spain), from April 1 to September 20, 2026. The exhibition will then continue its European tour at the Centre National de la Marionnette in Laval (France), from January 8 to March 7, 2027.
In the exhibition’s trilingual catalogue at TOPIC, which features a foreword by Louise Lapointe, President of UNIMA International, the artist intimately shares the sources of her inspiration, always driven by her desire to breathe life into matter.