Renée Bouchard

Lives and works in North Bennington, VT, USA

Artist statement

I am painter and single mother who intersects daily life with my studio practice. I work in spurts on several paintings simultaneously in a journalistic manner, documenting clusters of language, media, and memory with the present act of painting. I see children’s art as the earliest and most abstract search for language. This body of work documents the experience of pregnancy through works created with the participation of her young child. Non-traditional materials are brought inside to her home studio and glued to surfaces, walked on, or stapled to for flattening. My young child participated in a series of works in which he traced my body while I was laying down in a resting position. At the beginning of the pandemic, I invited my 7 year old to trace my body, then expanded the idea by inviting other mothers in my community to collaborate in a blue moon performance in my backyard. We took turns tracing the outline of our bodies on 50 x 50 inch thick Arches paper that were paintings I had begun using washes of color. The colors behaved as if they were part of a machine to intersect color theory and human rights. After all, one color can’t exist without another. The focus is on the interaction of colors versus color in isolation. The parameters within the human tracing project allowed for the ethics of care to become the conversation while questioning authorities that provide ‘human rights.’ By collaborating with others, the aim was to create a collective community to...

Artwork