Intuitive Refrains

Growth is inevitable, cyclical, uneasy, and laborious, and yet it’s the core of being. It creates physical and embodied reminders of coming into oneself. It requires you to bend into new shapes, crane your neck to see yourself from a different perspective, encounter old comforts, and make the conscious choice to move forward into something uncertain, all while hoping for the best. It is cyclical, uneasy, and laborious, yet each individual must live with the discomfort of becoming. Further, it is an increasingly complex process to create space for. The incessant need to produce, quickly and absolutely, invisibilizes the labour of self-fashioning. In favour of appearances, we have bypassed the aesthetics of process—the beauty of in-between spaces and remade objects. I think of slipping and scoring clay, where grooves help components adhere to one another. The tracks of a life lived are what bind us to one another. When these embodied knowledges are smoothed over, we are left with a conception of identities as fixed and polished, with nothing to hold us together.

Relying on imposed norms and systems to dictate identity rather than sitting with and listening to embodied processes creates rigidity and erases complex, fluid interactions as identities grow. In “From Interiority to Gender Performatives,” philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler contends with how action directly catalyzes identity: “Such acts, gestures, enactments, generally construed, are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs.” i In highlighting this process, Butler exposes the vitality of constant performance to create identity as something to be remade, restated, refelt within each action. 

Renée Edmona Mathews’ PROXY (2025), Gabrielle Larouche’s Déraciné (Uprooted) (2025), and Jacs Repei’s Blanket of Inaccessibility (2024) draw on intuition and embodied knowledge. They alchemize material into a body through which identity is performed and negotiated. An encounter with these works concentrates amorphous energy. Each artist takes up fleshy and fallible aspects of livingness, the imperfection of performance. They question, stretch, pick, re-orient and breathe through discomfort. These works are not definitive but rather sites of encounter and connection that embrace process and slow growth. They are not bodies to be read, but rather felt. 

As naturally as moving between inhaling and exhaling, these figures, depicted in pencil crayons on MDF and in sculpture, revolve at a gentle pace. Their long, slender figures are meant to mimic trees as they gather and tower over their environments. ii Their heads droop as their forms ebb and flow, revealing glowing protruding stomachs and expressionless faces, drawn together like a forest. Deep shading lends these figures a haunting appearance, moving between moments of apprehension and serenity at once, balancing on a razor's edge. The soft sculpture establishes space to pause and ruminate. With its silky body, the standing Déraciné, while solemn, provides a tangible sense of comfort, like an elder careening its neck to soothe a child. Larouche’s work calls attention to the body— its sensations and its knowledge. Though these forms appear self-contained, they offer pause and breath. The series relies heavily on Larouche’s somatic knowledge and her relationships to her mental health and environment. iii Larouche explicitly prioritizes process, both artistic and emotional. This physical and emotional tempo alongside the exposed textual quality of rough fabric and pencil crayon creates a way to locate oneself within this process.  It expresses the cycle of moving between emotional states; of becoming and unbecoming. Each hushed vignette offers a quiet insight into an emotional process—an unfiltered glimpse into Larouche’s body and its changing emotional landscape.  

Where Larouche attends to emotional states through constructing these cyclical forms, Mathews arrives at her notion of process through repetition, striking a balance between deconstruction and generation. The two Akebono papers that make up PROXY engulf the senses; the paper’s varied shades make the air seem visible, like thick fog. The space surrounding them is an opaque frame, obstructing the story of how one became emptier than the other. The small pile of loose inclusions suggests the labour-intensive process of artmaking.  

In PROXY, Mathews explores Body Focused Repetitive Behaviours (BFRBs) and their potential toll on the body by engaging with the Akebono paper. iv The thick visible fibres’ resemblance to skin and hair, activated Mathews’ BFRB and ignited a desire to “pick” the inclusions out of the paper—creating an external bodily “proxy.” v  Using intuition as a guide, Mathews freezes time and revels in process—an image at once created and unravelled, living in the in-between. The final stage of the picked Akebono paper is serene; a clear, fragile sheet. As time and light pass through, the few remaining inclusions become increasingly apparent standing in contrast to the densely textured untouched sheet beside it.  In PROXY, the relationship between the body’s power and BFRBs remains in a stalemate. During the creation of the piece, Mathews had to leave some inclusions untouched to maintain the sheet's overall integrity. Here, the artmaking process is a negotation with a BFRB. Conscious intent and compulsion work in tandem proposing a body caught in the balance between deconstruction and assemblage. While not necessarily locating a generative relationship, Mathews interrogates BFRBs and exposes the threads of this relationship.

Similarly, Repei’s Blanket of Inaccessibility addresses the uncomfortable and perhaps painful aspects of becoming, of an identity in constant negotiation. The work feels expansive; staples, gaps, and stitches punctuate geometric crushed shapes of black sandpaper, and when installed, the shadows of each segment deepen the work’s appearance. The jagged stitching sweeps across the gaps in the material. The disjointed staples allow light to pierce through the gaps, highlighting its fragmented nature. Like Mathews and Larouche, Repei allows intuition to guide process. Drawn to sandpaper for its abrasive nature and connection to manual labour, the material lays the foundation for Repei to negotiate their relationship to the history of butchness, an expression of queer masculinity and gender play that historically holds a strong association to the trades. vi They tackle this process with direct tactile engagement. Through ripping, wrinkling, contorting and crushing the material with their hands, the artist endeavours to transform sandpaper into an object of “comfort,” but to no avail. The tension between sandpaper’s enduring abrasiveness and the artist’s efforts to surpass it speaks to Repei’s experience with disability, preventing them from working in the trades and further accessing a path of self-affirmation within their butchness. vii Further, the work alludes to butchness as an identity that is and was fought for, never given. Stapled and sewn, this artwork requires discomfort, labour and action, and as a result possesses a livingness. A fundamental part of the artist's relationship to butchness is a notion of “unlearning the wrong” and “putting labour into what feels good.” viii Repei’s work attends to identity as a form of labour —taxing, yet worthwhile. Like Mathews and Larouche’s work, Repei also balances positive and negative, finding comfort in an uncomfortable process in the hopes of coming further into oneself.

Becoming is rarely straightforward and often works in cycles, like a refrain that returns throughout an unfamiliar song. It requires intuition and confidence. These three works, while approaching different topics, utilize artmaking to extend a slippery moment in time where one approaches discomfort, often lost to memory or suppressed in favour of the outcome. Process is malleable and personal; its varied shapes are expressed within these works and in doing so are quiet but poignant assertions of self-fashioning. Larouche’s work presents a meditation on emotional states, ruminating and changing within Déraciné. Mathews externalizes an embodied and personal process, exploring what it means to suspend deconstruction and generation in a single moment. Whereas Repei grapples with what it means to live alongside discomfort and the ever-present emotional and physical labour of that growing into oneself. Each work attends to a state of living, ongoing and unfinished, a vulnerable thing to expose. These works are aspects of ongoing conversations, relationships, and battles. They are a generous foundation for further exploration.