Filming an artistic odyssey in the face of a pandemic.
Cory Herperger’s camera capturing the wall when I was working on the side panels of the triptych (Fall of 2020).
Over the last 16 months, my mind and my hands have been busy with my most ambitious art project: a multimedia installation telling the story of four generations of francophone creative women from my own family. The triptych, done in an array of techniques, includes a MP3 player and sound system which are connected to a motion sensor; as someone approaches the artwork, one of the four edited soundscapes play out, to enrich the viewer’s experience. This project meant collaborating with my daughter and my mother, but also a colleague, a sound technician and a technologist. It was to be an artistic odyssey, and the subject of a documentary ... right in the middle of a pandemic!
The scope and the significance of the project caught the attention of the producer Francis Marchildon, from l’Atelier culturel, a division from the public broadcaster Radio-Canada. Late in the summer of 2020, he proposed to document my journey over many months. And so, between confinements and other sanitary measures, the small crew of two came to my atelier. They were masked, full of ideas and equipped with an impressive assortment of cameras of all size, lens, tripods, lights, even a drone … all to capture the artist in action, to discuss my inspirations, my doubts, my resilience.
The filming crew and I shared in the challenges. Most of the days, I felt blessed to walk into the atelier, resolved to focus on the creative task at hand, while the world was brought to its knees by an unforgivable disease. Truth to be told, there were too many times when I could not work because of the struggles brought on by the pandemic; with close family members finding themselves in perilous situations, I needed to be there for them. The stress took its toll.
The Atelier culturel crew had to be innovative as well to flesh out the story, juggling constrains along the way, especially as the third filming session kept being postponed because of COVID and, in the end, was cancelled. Since I valued this team effort to record all the twists and turns of the art process – I managed to film by myself a few segments, thanks to an old tripod, a good clip, a smartphone, and many takes. That brought a fresh perspective on my project.
I kept a journal apart from my regular notes and took numerous photos. These were useful material for both myself and the documentary. Knowing the crew was expecting material turned out to be an extra motivation to shot down what ever was happening outside the confines of the studio and forge ahead.
Today, the triptych is hanging on my big wall, in the atelier, ready to be packed and shipped to Edmonton, Alberta. There, it will join the works of six other women artists selected to take part in the collective exhibition: ‘Présence de femmes’, curated by Sabine Lecorre-Moore and funded by the Canadian Council for the Arts.
Here’s the link to the wonderful documentary: “Voix et passages” (original soundtrack in French).
Many, many thanks to Francis and the cameraman-editor Cory Herperger.