When I am thinking about the way I want to create, I imagine a giant mouth that wants to kiss, eat, touch everything. In my work, I am seeking to create sensual, sensitive living objects. I am looking for connections, for organic movements, for life and death cycles.

I recently came across some books by the Brazilian author Clarice Lispector, who is also a painter and a journalist. Her first book, Near to the Wild Heart, and one of her later ones, Agua Viva, had great impact on me. In the first one, she describes the life of a strange woman in a very poetic and powerful voice. The woman’s hypersensitivity gives her an almost animal way of perceiving the world and other human beings around her. She remains misunderstood by her surroundings, considered by others as something almost evil. What moved me in this book is the way she describes how her body and soul are linked to rocks, water, air – how the process of thinking, feeling, is something miraculous. In both of her books, as she goes back and forth between her feelings, her body and the surrounding natural world, her interior monologue emerges as very feminine and emotional. Everything is linked together, very colourful, almost like a painting, and existence is described as something supernatural.

During the residency I will explore the idea of a supernatural body, in a supernatural world, which may include drawings and collages. I will play with the idea of what is understood as something natural, as something that is impossible, or beyond natural laws (set by man), like feelings, emotions, generated by a body that we merely know. I will experiment with the natural environment around me and see how it resonates in my own body, in my natural rhythm, breathing – even in my voice, through performing actions and movements.

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Maude Deslauriers has a background in choreography, graduating in contemporary dance from Cégep de Saint-Laurent, Montréal. She currently practices in performance and video. In 2014, she went onto graduate in Studio Art from Concordia University.