Celeste Roberge is fascinated with creating art where there is an intersection of geological time and human time. She identifies the layers of history and memory that exist within everything, from people, to furniture, to natural materials found in the world around us. The artist says she creates sculptures where "the presence of matter and materiality is dominant," and where combinations of fleeting human existence stand in direct harmony with the steady and enduring powers of nature.
In reference to the inspiration for her work which can be applied to her piece Chaise Gabion, she writes "A few summers ago, I saw a nineteenth century leather psychiatrist couch at Polly Peter's Antique Shop in Portland, Maine. The weight and resonance of that couch obsessed me until I began the series Stacks. I was inspired by the absurd desire to embed antique sofas in thousands of pounds of dry-stacked stone in such a way that the furniture would seem like a fossil within a stone road-cut or like an archaic funerary monument extruded from the earth. Although we like to imagine that cultural artifacts, such as furniture and art, exist free of time and decay, the material conditions of the world inevitably recoup them."
Celeste Roberge was born in Maine and received her art education at the Maine College of Art, the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She lives in Gainesville, Florida where she is a Professor of Sculpture at the School of Art and Art History, University of Florida. She maintains a summer studio in South Portland, Maine.