F5: Katherine Duclos Talks Cement, Bubble Wrap, LEGO + More

Katherine Duclos had dabbled in drawing and photography, but it wasn’t until she moved to New York from Shanghai, China, that she wanted to seriously consider a creative path as a career. When she found an apartment in Brooklyn, she realized that Pratt Institute was just down the road and decided to enroll. She first had hopes of becoming an art teacher, and even though her original vision changed, the formal education marked a turning point in her life. “The decision to pursue art felt guided by my willingness to be vulnerable, and the universe answering at a time I needed it,” says Duclos.

Now based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Duclos explores themes of neurodivergence, parenthood, and reframing identity mid-life. She didn’t discover that she was autistic with ADHD until she was 42, and what she once viewed as failings she now sees as strengths.

So much of Duclos’ processing happens unconsciously, and so there are times when she will wake up with new knowledge or the capacity to understand something that she didn’t before. She is constantly evolving in real-time as her brain takes in tons of sensory data. Her ability to recognize patterns and then connect concepts across multiple subjects enhances every aspect of what she produces.

There is almost no delineation between life and work for Duclos. Even though she has external studio spaces, she has materials in every room of her home, which are indistinguishable from ordinary belongings. A full-time mother to two disabled and gifted children, every day is both a challenge and a wonder for the artist. Much of her work is all about parenting, and what lies beneath the need to meet the expectations of others.

Duclos always seeks transformation, either for the material she uses, her viewer, or herself. Her favorite part of the process is when she gets the intuitive spark about a change. “When I first develop a new way to use or see something, that’s everything to me – that moment of potential energy,” she notes.

Today, Katherine Duclos joins us for Friday Five!

A couple years ago my father gifted me an espresso machine, and ever since I have been making one or two oat milk lattes a day. They have become quite a significant part of my routine and add a ritual element to my morning that offers me, and those that follow my daily story shares, a moment of pause, surprise, and delight. This oat milk in particular is my favorite because of the way it foams. I need very good foaming capabilities to make my latte portraits.

2. Bubble Wrap

I use mostly recycled bubble wrap in my work, and though I’m sorry for loving this particular plastic, my attachment goes back to childhood and it runs deep. In the 1980s we didn’t have silicone fidget poppers, or knowledge of neurodivergence, but we had bubble wrap. My father was a shoe designer and received a lot of packages when I was a kid, so this material has been a tactile staple my entire life, providing familiar, safe, and satisfying ASMR before that was a term.

3. Window Screen

When I was a kid we had a little cottage on a pond in Southern Massachusetts that we would stay at in the summer. It was next to my Meme and Pepe’s cottage, where my father had spent summers as a kid. The sound of screen door opening and shutting was another childhood constant so strong I can hear it now in my head. During the evenings I would often stare through the screen at the moving water and watch the sunlight reflect while I unfocused my eyes, letting the screen blur into moire and color. I use it now in my work as a nod to this then-undiagnosed inattentive ADHD eye stim habit.

Obviously, I have to include LEGO because I really wouldn’t be talking to you about my work if it weren’t for this small but mighty modular building toy. I’m terrible at building in three dimensions. I can’t follow the instructions because of spatial reasoning/rotating disabilities, so the “builds” were never for me, but once I gave up having to “make a thing,” I realized how relaxing it can be to just put color in order with a satisfying click. I imagine those who knit, embroider, or puzzle know what I’m talking about, that quiet peace found in focusing on detail and repetition, that historical feminine work; but for so long LEGO has belonged and been marketed mostly to boys and men. I’d love to make a set for interior designers that explores colorways and textures specifically, not construction.

5. Cement

Prior to 2020 I had never really made sculpture but now it’s a large part of my practice. When I needed a material to express the weight and burden and every day repetition of early motherhood, cement immediately popped into mind. It’s not glamorous, it’s mundane, ubiquitous, decidedly not luxury. Cement is a material meant to support, to shore up and strengthen, to provide a strong base for other materials to extend from. It conveyed the immediacy and rigidity I wanted, and required little of the skills I was bad at. Once I figured out how to color it and control it better, I saw it could be luxurious and beautiful, solid but fragile still.

 

Works by Katherine Duclos:

“The Fairies will find us if we leave a trail”
It was inspired by my children’s belief that the small rainbows we would see refracted on the walls of our old house from a couple stained glass windows were actually little messages from the fairies who lived in our yard and protected us. When we moved last spring, they were worried the fairies wouldn’t find our new house so we had lots of discussions about how they could track us down. My kids are always in the work somewhere.

“Squirrels have squirrels”
This LEGO piece is my son’s favorite, and I wouldn’t be using LEGO at all if it weren’t for him so I thought I’d give him a pick. It’s called “Squirrels have Squirrels,” which is a phrase my mother uses a lot, referencing the fact I did the exact same thing as a child and shouldn’t expect anything else from my kids. This piece also took over 100 hours to make and shifts quite a bit visually depending on your angle of viewing.

I use the window screen in many different ways. Here’s a corner of my studio, where I am playing around with new work using vintage lace, crochet, screen, and bubble wrap  in preparation for my solo show next January at the ACT Gallery in Maple Ridge, British Columbia.

This piece was my first large-scale bubble wrap piece. It’s called Upstate NY 2013 and is reminiscent of the light and color in a forest on a specific day in early autumn while I was on a hike.It took over 100 hours to make.

Every day, outside of the hot months, I have coffee with a stranger. I’ve made over 700 latte portraits so far. When my father gifted me this machine I had never made a latte, let alone a portrait. But within a few weeks I was hooked on this daily practice.

Seen here are some of the collected cement sculptures I made when my practice shifted in 2020 to work about me and my family and our experience. A new material sparked new desires to unmask and understand the person my children had revealed me to be.