Joëlle Dubé

The walls of the author-academic Joëlle Dubé’s studio look like a mind-map, a series of cut-out words, ideas, and images joined together by vision of their overall unity. It’s a privilege to walk into her process this early on, when the final peer-reviewed article/presentation she is preparing is not complete. Sharing in-process work is a vulnerable feeling, and Dubé is opening her space in a context in which others at Est-Nord-Est, all artists in residence, have three-dimensional, sculptural objects to anchor them during their show-and-tell.

During her two-month residency, Dubé has taken on the task of writing an entire academic article. This is a tight timeline considering the amount of research and work that goes into these types of endeavours. In the paper, she focuses on artists working with matches, interesting objects because they both make fire and are consumed by it, according to Dubé’s theoretical framework. The cut-out pieces of paper on the wall document art-historical references to matches, but the research centres mostly on Token Generosity (2024) by Audy Murray, a multidisciplinary Métis artist from Saskatchewan. Thinking about refusal – because the Cree syllabics that adorn the box make the text and full meaning of the work accessible only to those who can read the language – but also of the work as a takeaway – a gift meant to be kept by the audience – Dubé is expanding the manifest destiny of a match as an object of auto-destruction.

At night, when Dubé’s mind is a little “brain-dead” from writing and researching all day, she lets go of the computer screen, books, and article, and plays around with clay in the studios. Making something with her hands, with “no goal or finality,” gives her something physical to do. This embodied, performative process feels like a complement to that of writing an article, a necessary balance to the more cerebral components of her practice. In the context of this residency, Dubé has found the headspace to research and write, but she also discovered doing with her hands, a welcome counterpart to the isolation of life as an academic researcher.