LIFE FLOW SEEN by ADA WALTERS
In January of this year, Caroline Cloutier retreated to the Mojave Desert for a transformative spiritual experience. Under a cool sun, she cycled repeatedly through life and death. “It’s like the four seasons, there is a moment when you just hibernate, and you’re cold and you need to rest, you need to be in your grotto, and at some point there is humidity and warmth and that makes the seed grow.” After dying, she says, a hundred times, she felt deeply connected to the cycle of life and to her own place within it. “Embracing the cycle is very important. I am alive and I’m going to die, and I’m going to come back—but now is the moment to flourish.” Emerging into the desert she found both the sun and moon in the afternoon sky. The image took on totemic significance as she began to integrate her experience. As the urgency of a dream’s message can fade in the time it takes to reach for a notebook, she was afraid of losing her way back to the threshold of spiritual exchange. “It’s difficult to keep the feeling alive. In January I was, like, I need to finish this project next week because I am waking up—or I’m falling asleep.”
Immediately upon her return to Montreal, Cloutier filled walls of her studio with tests on paper, spreading breath-like progressions of pastel by hand, “letting it flow through me”, in colour combinations aglow with empyreal and cosmic resonances. Other tests were shaped and folded into abstract geometric forms, predominantly circular or ovoid. Guided by her tests, Cloutier created a series of shaped, coloured subjects, and photographed them under natural light. “I always want to work with the sunlight as it shifts. I try to catch the best angle at the best time. When I have found the right angle it’s because the play of shadow and light is making me question my perception of the subject. The lines I’ve drawn create another layer, so I’m not sure anymore what’s in front, what’s behind. If I question the physicality of what is in front of me—that is perfect lighting.” The images, enlivened with uncertain dimension, were then dramatically enlarged and affixed to flat, contoured panels, and sealed with plexiglass. Here the works made their final transformation into generative object-images, directing a visual flow to the innermost values of meaning-making. Gigantically elemental, charged with behaviours of colour and geometry otherwise found in afterimages, these works beckon from beyond the periphery, and yet they draw near, uniting the spirits of both the seeking and the wary.
To further examine the traces of her time in the desert, Cloutier undertook a series of meditation drawings, “a different corpus generated by the same spiritual experience”. Drawn on eight consecutive days, the small-scale works resemble oracle cards, finished in gold and featuring titles like Inner Fire and Alternate Reality—reflective prompts on emerging themes. “I meditate and one shape will come to mind. It will maybe levitate, or something will happen around it. That’s the starting point, when the shape moves.” For Cloutier, creating the series was a way to journal or engage in a kind of automatic writing about her new insights. The coloured pencils used in the series belonged to a late mentor. “By using her pencils, I bring something of her energy, and the link between us, into the drawing.” This invites reflection upon her connection to her ancestors, she adds, and “to everything beyond the physical world.” Resplendent with imagery of convergence and reciprocation, the meditation drawings shimmer with auspicious intent.
On a table in her studio, propped against a ceremonial bowl, is a tarot card, the Ten of Cups. In the image, ten cups form a rainbow, promising joy and fulfillment. For Cloutier, the card’s chance drawing resounded with her newfound sense of connection. Her pilgrimage to the desert marked a beginning to what she describes as a period of spiritual awakening. “There was something on a very deep level that needed to shift. I wanted to expand my perception. What I saw was so beautiful and I am part of it. We all are. We are channels for life and love and light—this is what the show is about.”
Ada Wolters is a writer living along Lake Ontario, near Grafton.