AFTER WINTER, BEFORE SPRING

Graphite on Paper
2017 – 2019

The Winnipeg suburb of Whyte Ridge, where Kirouac and her elderly mother live, sits at a point of tension between mundane and savage, contrary to the popular critical discourse around urban suburb developments as being largely uninspiring. Built beneath a natural geese migratory route, a forced interdependency between humans and natural systems exist and at times clash, particularly after winter but before spring. Her graphite drawings of dismembered bird parts, a disabled tree pushing out its last pronouncement of life, the Weeping Birch and the graphic poetry of swollen and blackened tumors of black knot all lend themselves to sublime and unnoticed perfection.

Indicative of the most difficult time of the year in the Northern prairies considered a season in and of itself to locals, March through April lays bare evidence of the battles between natural growth and our compulsion to ‘correct’ it, aggressively shaping them into conformity. Using the scrutiny of a true romantic, Kirouac draws out her relationship with and to these isolated, vulnerable forms and their cautionary yet blunt existence in this sparse environment, a process of acceptance of not only their violent wounds, but her own as well.