Northern Crossing | Images and thoughts
Abduction or the departure from childhood
In the continuity of my works on the theme of the childhood imagination, I have developed a new series of images entitled Northern Crossing which focuses on female adolescence. And more specificaly to the inner turbulences that agitate the woman in the making.
Most of my pictures for this project were taken last winter during a creative residency at the Centre d'art de Kamouraska. In the manner of metaphysical interpretations of tales such as Snow White or Sleeping Beauty, where the sleeping princesses symbolize the numbness of nature during the cold season, I chose a winter setting to depict the last hours of latency of young girls at the dawn of their spring.
This first work, entitled "Abduction", was an obvious way to launch the series.
Below are some of the other images in the series along with my thoughts during their creation.
Public Intimacy
The entry into adolescence comes with its share of complex contradictions. The need to assert oneself is accompanied by extreme vulnerability. If a teenager is always alone in facing her own metamorphosis, her bodily changes extend, so to speak, into the public eye. Exposed to the indelicate remarks of an overbearing uncle or dad who think they are funny, one would like to sink six feet under...
Thanks to my friends Fanny, Isabelle B. and Isabelle P. for lending me your sexy underwear. As you can see, they got plenty of fresh air!
The Gold Fish
The period of adolescence sometimes feels like a choppy sea. With its complex currents, its changing winds, its breaking waves. No longer a child, not yet a woman, the young girl moves, between two waters, in search of herself and her destiny...
Hesitation
The urge is so strong. How to resist taking the leap? Yet she hesitates. Freedom is demanding…
Runaway
With only herself as baggage, the road suddenly seems unpredictable....
Parental Unravelling
Be they plain or purl, there comes a time in life when one feels the need to unravel a certain number of stitches in order to better shape them to the contours our developing self.
Ambivalence
What story lies behind this early morning gaze?
I wanted to express the feeling of ambivalence that often accompanies a girl’s first period. For some, the pride of joining the community of women is empowering. For others, the flow of blood is source of embarrassment. In both cases, the appearance of menses tolls the end of childhood carelessness as the wheel of life turns…
Shaky Territory
The Prom Dress
The big day has finally arrived! Everything is as she planned, nothing is like in her dreams…
Faraway, so close
A field of ice as far as the eye can see,
a future life looms like a stranger
with one’s self at the roads end.
An improbable encounter, often imagined,
the story of a woman, revealed…
Migration
After the time of swings in the park, comes the season of migrations. The wind starts to blow; the young girl sets sail towards uncharted territories…
Impatience
It’s a big world out there! I am free, but I don’t quite understand what it means. As I stand at the edge of my life, a wave of vertigo sways through my heart like a giddy wind…
She Wolf
With She Wolf, I am exploring the theme of the awareness that the young teenager can have of her own power of seduction. Here, the pleasant side of this new sensation dominates the scene. The world is at her feet. It seems to belong to her. But on closer inspection, is there not a trace of uncertainty emanating from the gaze? A hint of hesitation that escapes from the smile?
Lifeline
One day she feels all grown-up, the next wishes she could be little again. It’s a constant back and forth…
Suspended Animation
It was a good long time ago that the King’s daughters disembarked in New France,
That ancestor Rondeau settled on the north shore of the Île d’Orléans,
That generations have succeeded one another,
That women have birthed… Where does your gaze turn today?
It seems suspended, like a musical pause, in a hiatus,
While a still hesitant, uncertain body
Is swept up in the rising tide
Before the wheels of time are set in motion once again.
Self-Construction
Some people say I look like my mother. Others that I act just like my father. But wish I knew what is unique about me…
I IS Another
Who am I? Adolescence, we often tend to forget, is above all a time of intense creativity. The quest for one’s identity is quite a journey…
Flight
When creating this image, in the back of my mind was the touching scene in the film The Bélier Family where Paula, a 16 year old teenager, passes an audition for a singing contest. Wining the contest would mean leaving home and her family. She sings Je vole, a song about the legitimate and vital need of youth for emancipation and the inevitable passage to adulthood. I can’t watch this excerpt without shedding a few tears at the thought my own daughters will be flying away for real in a few years…