Louise Boisclair

An essayist, researcher, and art critic living in Montreal, Louise Boisclair is interested in aesthetic, immersive, interactive, and climatic experiences. In line with her research, titled “Art and environment, ecology, and climate,” she proposed, for her spring residency at Est-Nord-Est, to explore the effects of immersion in a new environment. She forsook the city to immerse herself in natural surroundings inhabited by the imposing presence of the great St. Lawrence River, spending time with artists and authors, experiencing awareness of the body in interaction with diverse projects. Central to this encounter with the environment, she set out to enrich her vocabulary of the colours, winds, clouds, and water found there and to open her work to works in the region to let new possibilities emerge, to create new images that evoke climatic perceptions and issues. From her exploration of these stimuli and how they enabled her to apprehend both her surroundings and art, a question arose: how can the movement of nature be distilled in the movement of writing?

To enrich her reflection, Louise’s time in residency was organized around writing exercises punctuated with daily tai chi sessions, bicycling and walking in the village and close to the river, and revealing mandalas. For the body must be put in motion in spaces, in living geography. To activate the process of creation, one must, as she says, walk the words, pedal the phrases, draw the paragraphs, link the pages. She also believes that our surroundings lead to development of a new mode of expression resulting from where we are stimulated, disturbed, destabilized, enchanted. Without the addition of soul, she concludes, notwithstanding beautiful words and sentences, writing is empty.