Through drawing, Catherine Desroches explores the entanglements of mind, body, and landscape: a relationship between place and imagination, where imagination becomes an ethic. For several years, she has taken an intuitive approach to drawing as a way of bearing witness to a chosen relationship with place, particularly the St. Lawrence Estuary. Her practice is rooted in a geopoetic perspective that emphasizes the importance of establishing an attentive, responsive relationship to one’s immediate environment in order to better understand one’s role within it, drawing on personal traditions, whether inherited or self-created.
For Desroches, drawing, which turns its gaze humbly to the landscape, is a mode of expression capable of responding to a need for collective rather than individualistic perspective. Half in the world, half elsewhere, her practice seeks, through mineral abrasion, traces of what endures. What began as a naive sense of wonder and contemplation now appears as an attempt to anchor personal memory in a broader, older collective memory – one that is both political and telluric.
Through wandering, walking, collecting, writing, drawing daily, and sustained interactions with a chosen place, her work reflects on landscape, loss, exile, poetry, environmental ethics, and the decision to establish the nomadic studio as a way of life.
Catherine Desroches spends her time between Tiohtià:ke / Montréal and Rimouski. She graduated with a BFA from Concordia University in 2024. Her first solo exhibition was hosted by Pangée (Tiohtià:ke / Montreal) in 2024, and her work has been featured in several group exhibitions, notably at Galerie FOFA, Fais-moi l’art, Espace Loulou, and Pangée, as well as at major art fairs such as Art Toronto (Tkaronto / Toronto), Plural (Tiohtià:ke / Montreal), and Material (CDMX).
