Tactile colour, tangible memory

“You know, she doesn’t glue any of it down,” the museum worker says. I’m peering at an intricate piece of LEGO art by Katherine Duclos. Her exhibition, The Light & Colour We Carry, is taking place in the Art Rental & Sales showroom room of the Vancouver Art Gallery. The museum worker spins on his office chair: “She calls herself a purist.”

“Every single brick is put down with consideration and purpose,” Duclos wrote on her social media. “This kind of color composition is something I’ve been doing since childhood. . . Personally, I think I’m a lightsaber and lever genius but I’m biased.”

She’s not wrong. In “Let your sad light be a beacon (Raincouver),” lightsabers drip down the piece like rain. Trees are attached at odd angles, drawing the vision in and up. Duclos received her MFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York and moved to Vancouver in 2017. Duclos created this series over six months as her family prepared to move out of their Vancouver rental home of the last seven years. Duclos gathered the colour she wanted to take with her, writing, “it’s my sensory memories that anchor me as a person and help me move forward. Light and colour have always been there for me.”

Duclos is an autistic woman with ADHD. The exhibition statement explains: “Times of transition and upheaval are particularly difficult for autistic families and Katherine’s need to order her world became more intense as her home became more chaotic and the future seemed unclear. To better prepare herself for the changes, she focused on regulatory work that enabled her to feel a sense of control and order amidst the chaos.”

Duclos is honest on her social media about how autism impacts her as an artist: “I have to be very careful what I commit to because as soon as I say I will do something, I’ve made it a demand for myself that my brain will try to push away. I am disabled. This is not a thing in my control.” She continues to describe the ways she works around the way her nervous system perceives a commitment as a threat – and how that honesty about what she can, and can’t, do is sometimes spurned by clients.

‘To soften ourselves’

The piece I’m staring at is mind-bending in its detail. It’s called “Sometimes, the asymmetry is so subtle it’s subversive” and so I try to catch the subtle asymmetry. I count block by block, comparing colours. When I finally see a purple dot spun the far side of a circle I turn to tell the museum worker, who has moved on to a phone call.

“This piece is built symmetrically on a slightly asymmetrically painted base,” Duclos wrote. “This kind of pattern design and slight pattern breaking is something I’ve been doing since I was a small child. I’ve built very few pieces that incorporate symmetry and rigid structure because it’s hard for me to stick to the pattern as it becomes a demand I have to meet.” One of her pieces is titled, “Sometimes, the tyranny of symmetry reigns supreme.” Yet even if patterns are a demand to her, it’s clear to me that Duclos perceives colour patterns I’m blind to and can recreate them – layering thousands upon thousands of blocks.

The titles of her pieces read like a poem: “To soften ourselves, we have to let all of our edges be touched.” Or, “I will walk ahead of you and scaffold the light so you can always see the path forward.”

The exhibition is a love letter to her two children who also have autism. Her son, Augie, is the one who showed her, through play, how LEGO could be transformed into an art medium and her children often join her in the studio. “I will scaffold for my kids as long as they need it,” Duclos wrote on social media.

“It took becoming a mother for me to reveal my vulnerabilities to anyone and I almost couldn’t recognize what they showed me. . . I’ve had to grow a new skin these last few years. This one is softer, maybe not as capable of camouflage, but it’s far more secure than any armour I masked with in the past.”

‘Temper your touch, please’

The piece that draws me back, over and over, for the sheer amount of it is “Temper your touch, please.” Is it a request? A warning? LEGO is inherently tactile and I keep my hands clasped behind my back when I lean in to look closer. (“What an enormous amount of trust,” I say to the museum worker, “for her to put this in front of us.”) Duclos has been working on this piece for one and a half years; there are 4608 tiny levers. Some stand perfectly upright, others are braided in exact patterns, swaths of them toppled, spray-painted into pinks and oranges. “Temptation and touch and pushing and pulling and tension are all deeply embedded in these little levers,” she wrote. “This piece was nuts to make.”

When I get home and look up Duclos’ old interviews, I find that she does encourage people to touch the pieces. “I want to create exhibitions that include a sense of touch and tactility because for a large portion of the world, that’s a part of the art experience that’s very much missing,” Duclos told the CBC last year, after LEGO commissioned her to make ten pieces for them – and mailed her $7000 worth of LEGO blocks.

“Our senses are some of our most important guides and we’re losing them in this digital age. I’m using tactile materials that we have all touched on purpose to access the sensory memories locked away in all of us.”