Corespiration Yellow

Solo show, Georges-Vanier Cultural Centre, Montreal, Canada, June 6th – August 18th 2024

Bathed in your color, you nourish, envelope and protect me. You crystallize and preserve the memory of a collective process, an environment, an adaptation.  

What if corespiration had a color? The exhibition Corespiration Yellow furthers Julie Roch-Cuerrier’s ongoing research into the concept of corespiration, exploring this time – through a chromatic lens – the relationship between the individual and the collective through our relationship with nature.

Experimenting with natural materials such as pollen, honey and beeswax, Roch-Cuerrier is interested in how materials can carry social interactions. By incorporating these into her blown glass and bronze works, she reflects on the potential of these substances to convey the environmental and transgenerational histories they are imbued with. The conception of the works is closely linked to the artist’s research into the properties of flavonoids, the pigments that give pollen its color. Antibacterial and antiviral, they also protect plants from UV rays. Their absorption in ultraviolet, perceptible to insects, guides them to nectar, giving them a key role in the pollination process. By referring to the color yellow, Roch-Cuerrier underlines the ability of certain elements to retain the memory of environmental, collective and adaptive processes. Lastly, each composition is a poetic transposition of our contact with others and the territory, offering an intimate and singular portrait of the multiple relationships that make up our environment. 

Taking the form of infusions, fermentations or medicinal tinctures integrated into the exhibition’s corpus, this digestible transformation of materials is an invitation to heal our bodies and minds. Faced with the precariousness and conflicts that disrupt our planet on a daily basis, Roch-Cuerrier uses this new body of work to imagine collective remedies for better corespiration.