Artist’s book: 2 stitched accordions, bound back to back, with inkjet printed images and original brief narrative text in French on Rives BFK paper and Kizuki Kozo, 13 x 16.1 x 1.8 cm (closed).
The original copy made in 2018 was presented in the Canadian Bookbinders and Book Artists Guild’s juried quinquennial travelling exhibition Art of the Book 2018. Featured in the story, The Art of the Book 2018 exhibition at UVic, on CHEK TV, Victoria, 11 August 2018.
A special edition of 4 was created in 2022.
In French, the words "mère" and "mer" not only sound the same, they are both feminine. The origin of the large project "De mère en mer" (From Mother to Sea) began in 2010 with the acquisition of a plastic mesh mask, a crude cast of my mother's head and shoulders that was used for radiation treatments; a week-long stay alone in a house perched on the north shore of the St. Lawrence River, awakening a fondness of the sea, distant lands and lost memories of French, Belgian, Acadian, Native, Quebec, Franco-Ontarian, and other female ancestors; old songs and readings about Acadian life; and a cruise on the St. Lawrence River and Seaway. This tactile work, two accordions bound back-to-back, includes original images, both photographic montages of the St. Lawrence River and Northeastern Ontario lakes and reproductions of charcoal, chalk and graphite drawings from the "De mère en mer" series. On the last page of each accordion is half of the narrative text where the sentences of one have been rearranged in reverse order to create the text of the other, evoking a sense of déjà vu, a cycle. The intimate story, told in French in the first person singular, is about journeys, impressions, memories, the loss of a mother and those before her, set around bodies of water.
