Brownstein: Making Montreal more beautiful, one sidewalk crack at a time
Container of mixed cement in one hand, an orange cone in the other and a tiny mosaic depicting an owl in her pocket, Laurence Petit heads off to execute her favourite outdoor pastime: inserting her art into city sidewalk cracks.
Her burgeoning core of fans calls her La Fée des Trottoirs (The Sidewalk Fairy). For good reason. She is seeking to make Montreal more beautiful one sidewalk crack at a time, and she is slowly but surely succeeding.
On this magical sunlit morning, Petit has found a beckoning sidewalk crack in the Mercier—Hochelaga-Maisonneuve borough, not far from her home.
Before she could begin her sidewalk work a few days earlier, Petit had to head back to her studio with proper dimensions to determine what shape and what kind of tile would best befit this crack. She decided upon an owl mosaic, which took five arduous hours of mechanical and technical work to put together.
Now down on her knees over the sidewalk, Petit proceeds to clean up the crack. Next comes the laying down of the cement.
Finding the right crack with the right proportions is paramount to the process. But the cement is key to the installation. Her tiles must be able to weather sidewalk snowplows, not to mention heavy foot traffic. After much experimentation, Petit feels she has hit on a solid cement formula.
She gently places the owl mosaic in the crack and will wait about an hour for the cement to dry. To ensure that no damage can come to this mosaic — like a garbage truck on the street veering close to the sidewalk crack — she places her trusty orange cone, with some fresh flowers protruding from the top, over the spot. The cone is emblazoned with another of her nicknames, Gogo Frisette, although she prefers La Fée des Trottoirs.
Time consuming as the operation is, Petit, born and raised in the city, has placed about 200 mosaics over the last five years in Montreal. She hasn’t restricted herself to her home borough: Her work has been under the feet of folks all over Montreal — including around the Bell Centre, with some pieces featuring Habs netminding sensation Jakub Dobes, whom she affectionately refers to as Doby on her tiles. Her work has also shown up in Quebec City and the Gatineau region. Plus, she fulfilled a commission to do 10 pieces for a street festival in France.
Most pieces were done anonymously. Only her more recent ones carry her nametag.
So, what first possessed Petit to hit sidewalks and the abundant cracks therein?
“It was the pandemic,” she says. “I had a lot of time on my hands. Too much time. I remember watching someone in France doing this. This type of street art is actually called flacking.”
In urban art circles, flacking, derived from the French word flaque (which translates as puddle), refers to the reparation of cracked sidewalks or potholes through filling them with bright-coloured mosaic tiles.
“I thought I should be doing that here, but I worried with our climate it wouldn’t work here with the snowplows and everything. But because I had plenty of time, I decided to try doing this in front of my house. Sadly, it didn’t stick that first winter. So I talked with a retired engineer who advised me on which cement to use and I created a new technique. And, incredibly, it all worked the next year.”
Perhaps she might next consider flacking on a larger tableau: potholes?
“I don’t think so,” Petit shoots back with an ear-to-ear grin. “That could be dangerous. My mission is to bring the city alive with small tiles, mostly focusing on small animals like owls, cats, dogs, rabbits, foxes and even some mice.
“It makes me feel so good when I run into people who say they were having a bad day but after seeing my mosaics their mood had changed. I heard from one woman who said her husband never liked walking before, but now he walks with her to search for my mosaics. If I’m helping keeping people healthy because of my mosaics … I really can’t ask for much more than that,” she says, letting out a laugh.
She takes her inspiration from a line in the Leonard Cohen tune Anthem: “There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”
Petit says she doesn’t require a permit to carry out her work, because it’s not on the street and because she is “repairing not defacing sidewalks.”
“I know it sounds crazy, but I feel the cracks are talking to me.
“When I started this sidewalk-crack flacking, I was just doing it for fun, for free, for me, with all my heart,” notes Petit, who later received some grants from her borough and a provincial arts group. “I had no expectations whatsoever. I never expected it would have this kind of impact, to make me and others feel good.”
Petit’s point is driven home when a passing motorist pulls to a stop on the street where her latest installation is drying under the orange cone.
“I just adore her work … adore it. It brightens up our borough. Just her smile alone brightens up our day,” says the ebullient motorist, Claude Mimeault, who lives close by. “My wife and my grandchild are also big fans. We’re doing a lot of walking around here with our heads pointing down to the sidewalks, looking for her tiles.
“It does the heart good to know that there are people doing this kind of community work just for the love of it. We can’t ask for much more — other than the Canadiens winning the Stanley Cup,” Mimeault muses.
Petit has been a mosaic artist for 20 years, operating out of her garage-turned-studio and churning out larger pieces, which she has exhibited at galleries and sells. Some are really large.
Then there’s the mosaic mural on one of the buildings in the Habitations Jeanne-Mance complex downtown, whose creation she oversaw and contributed to; the piece measures a whopping 100 feet long and 25 feet high.
Although Petit once led mosaic workshops, she doesn’t have an art-school degree. Actually, she has never even taken classes in the field.
“For fun years ago, I once went to go to a class my friend was taking. I’ve visited a lot of artist studios to see how they were doing mosaics, but that’s about it,” she says. “Mostly, I guess what I would be called is self-taught. It has worked for me, and I haven’t stopped doing these mosaics ever since.”
Petit is nothing if not upbeat.
“I love Montreal. It’s important all citizens do what we can do to improve and beautify the city — it’s all our responsibility, not just our politicians,” she says. “Of course it’s so sad to see parts of the city deteriorating. But I have to be perfectly honest here: If the sidewalks in the city were in such beautiful shape, I wouldn’t have this rewarding work to do. It has become my mission and my passion.”