Terre Des Femmes, 2017

Terre Des Femmes, 2017

Terre Des Femmes at the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art, curated by Marie-Eve Beaupré.

It is interesting to look back and trace how the gesture began. The first time I remember collecting earth was on my trip to the Sinai desert. I had just acquired a camera and during the eight days that I was there, I was constantly trying to capture the experience through the lens of the camera. I must have shot thirty-six rolls of film. The irony is that these photographs sit in a dusty drawer. The experience in the Sinai desert overwhelmed me - nothing could have prepared me for it. I had never experienced the sky so radiant and clear. At night we sat around the campfire and drank tea with the Bedouins, trading all sorts of odds and ends. I would try to imagine what their lives were like. I panicked when we started our trip back to civilization. I also realized that in spite of the fact that I had taken so many photographs, I had not gotten what I wanted. There is no way that the photographs captured what I observed, felt or experienced. I gathered some earth and stones, and thus began my earth collection. This was about twenty-seven years ago. I remember the place and the moment where I collected the earth, and if it is no longer part of my conscious memory, it becomes absorbed and becomes part of the experience that makes me who I am. It has always been a challenge for me to strip the work down to it's essentials. There is no association to a particular geography. Eliminating the names means that attention is not drawn to boundaries, or the aspect of 'earth' that separates us, but to 'earth', the material that binds us.