Spring Beach Cowichan Lake (Vancouver Island Project), 2026

Catherine Bolduc  

Catherine Bolduc takes an interest in the way the psyche interprets the real by projecting its desires on it, and by transgressing it through idealization and fantasizing. The outside world is viewed here as a subjective mental construction in which memory, whether individual or collective, influences perception and where fiction and reality merge. Drawing both on the autobiographical and autofictional, Bolduc's explorations share elements of the travel story or childhood recollections as well as of dreamscapes or hypnotic wanderings. Presented as large-scale installations or as interventions on paper, these works alternate between the domestic and the cosmic, the sublime and the apocalyptic, in which magic shows another reverse side. By way of her themes, the motifs and materials used (decorative, kitsch, cosmetic), and a self-assumed reclaiming of affect (emotion and the romanticism), Bolduc takes a feminist stance in her practice.