Sarah Boutin
at Paspébiac

“Since the death of my grandmother, my body no longer has the strength to mix dust together with water to make plasterboard, or to shape mounds of clay for fashioning wounded birds. Going to the fruit and vegetable shop, peeling and cooking the squash, eating it, washing the plate, stretching out in the clover calls on all the energy I’m capable of. The everyday, that very simple life, its slow pace, takes me close to the process of unloading demanded by the experience of loss. It clears a space in the artistic approach. I return to the studio to water the hoya, I gather up a cotton canvas. Successively, I carry it, stretch it, fold it again. The tissue acts as a shroud with which I embrace what survives the absent woman. I make an inventory of the objects of my artistic production – a casting of palms in wax, porcelain cupolas – that came before the loss, the way you draw up a list of the things in an uninhabited house before emptying it out. In the garden, the lilac, the linden, the chickadee talk to me of the ways in which my grandmother took care of them. This photographic documentation attempts to tame the missing things not as gaps to be filled (the approach I take has no curative aim), but to learn to exist with them.” – Sarah Boutin