Ouvrage

Postures is a first intriguing grouping. The basic material for these works is woollen socks – those traditionally worn by lumberjacks and coureurs des bois that recently re-emerged as a fashion statement. In the exhibition Fait main (2018), curated by Bernard Lamarche at the MNBAQ, Bujold presented, in a glass showcase, such socks rolled and recomposed to evoke body positions and familiar domestic objects. The grouping exudes a whiff of anthropomorphism and allomorphism. In the showcase, they’re bunched together and difficult to distinguish from each other. However, photographs make it possible to see them in detail and repertory them as a sort of organized series. These pieces made from practical pieces of clothing are offered both in their material uniqueness – as forms in themselves – and arranged in a configuration as pictures in a grid.

Promenade dans la bourgade plastique, a video made in 2018, is also revealing in many ways. Based on photographs of roses taken at the Botanical Garden, rings in repeated rows appear in a continuous interlacing. On a perfectly arithmetical level, there are four rows of nine rings, for a total of thirty-six, and five rows of eight rings, for a total of forty. Therefore, there are a total of seventy-six states of a primary geometrical figure that become animated as the rings are infused with different colours. Movement is created simply by the effects of the diverse luminosities that run through them in waves. This single form, repeated, gains meaning through its colorations.

Reading the description of these two works, it’s hard to believe that they were created by the same artist. This might seem like a superficial exercise, but it points out the diversity of forms that Bujold’s art encompasses. Sometimes, in a single exhibition, she deploys a veritable armada of practices and media. For instance, in Ménage/Montage, presented as a retrospective (almost) exhibition at Vidéochroniques in Marseille, curated by Edouard Monnet, a wide range of these different aspects of Bujold’s work were on display. Videos, a showcase of Polaroids in a tight grid, socks and slippers stuffed and sewn together, minimalist sculptures in coloured geometric forms, jacquard-woven photographic images – it was all there. The show culminated in a series of exchanges among media with a work from the corpus Pixels et petits points (2004), Mire de couleurs: an embroidery of an off-air television set, showing the colour bars in the test pattern, cut off at the bottom of the screen. Here, more than elsewhere, we can see the interweaving, borrowing, and carrying over of practices – exchanges of materiality, as Monnet wrote – the intermedial criss-crossing of forms, motifs, materials.

Versions of the colour bar recur, including in an installation that deconstructs the colours by showing the balls of coloured wool with which the weft is produced. The titles of the video variants always begin with Mire (which means test pattern). The colour bar shows up for the first time, being knitted, in the video Onelie de l’Oneli (2000). Around 2019 came Mires et effets, Mires et carreaux, and Mires et autres effets. These reference points convey the idea of an intention, an objective to attain – a standard by which to judge the quality and exactness of colours – modulated into different media. So, it seems that the goal may be reached in various ways, that we can turn to many dissimilar states and maintain coherence in the progression. The test pattern, it should be noted, is also closely linked to the video medium – that of the video signal, today mutated into an electronic binary codification of data. We will return to video below, as its use also informs of us of what is at play here.

In the meantime, I’ll add to the list of works contributing to our effort at interpretation another piece, Pixels et petits points, an embroidery measuring 10 cm by 11 cm, representing an additive synthesis of colours. Unlike the previous Mires, this object is an educational aid that follows colour-composition logic.¹ Transcending video, the colour bar proves to be a constant.

Something vaguely analogous is found in Variation bûcheron (1998): on a shelf are frames, eminently material, over which are stretched the familiar checked patterns of work shirts, a canonical dress code dubbed “mackinaw” by the author Jacques Ferron. These acrylic canvases – which may be perceived as fabric – are a selection of about thirty out of total of the eighty-eight painted by Bujold; but no matter, the word Variation remains singular; because it’s a single reality, no doubt. There is an obvious relationship with women’s work: hand weaving, making clothing, quilting utilitarian fabrics, patching made necessary by a concern with saving money by the almost-needy, recycling of trimmings and vestiges. But it is also a reference to Malevich’s white square, the primary shapes of the Québec Automatistes, and the visual considerations of the Constructivists and others besotted with basic geometric shapes. This doesn’t have to do with an effort to raise a “trivial” artisanal practice to the more “serious” and austere objectives of the art world; nor, on the contrary, to trivialize that world by reducing it to the simple utilitarian gestures of making things. Rather, it’s to show that beyond the object as conceived, a constant exists in the fact of creating: that these forms do not fall within these categories but overflow them. That the impulse to create takes up the same issues and leads to the same formal efforts.

Variation bûcheron was part of the project En wing en hein (1998–2000), which was exhibited fairly widely. The reference here to Québec pop culture could not be clearer; the title alludes to the gibberish in the refrain of a well-known song by Oscar Thiffault, “Le rapide blanc,” whose lyrics mention weaving, embroidery, and hand sewing (as opposed to high style!). If “l’hiver sera long” (the winter will be long), as the song says, the work socks hung on the wall are just as long. Piles of wool sit on the floor. The slippers in Foyers, doux foyers are a piecework construction of stuffed knitted fabric pieces; similar knitted pieces are also configured to resemble dwellings such as nests, burrows, and igloos that can be fit into each other. A teapot made of stiffened fabrics is hung on the wall like a painting (Confidences). Its materiality results from a technique once used by farm women: it was preserved by being soaked in a mixture of water and sugar and then dried.² In a showcase, a cornucopia also evinces destabilizing materiality.

So, these years involved weaving, as one would do with connections that might exist among different objects, whether they are associated with a garment or with pop culture. For weaving is an activity that anyone can do, and does, especially for utilitarian reasons, as I’ve mentioned. That what is woven becomes sculpture even though it was originally a garment is of little importance.

The French word that means “to weave,” tisser, is derived from the common Indo-European word tek̂Þ, which means “working with wood or fabric.” Other derivations of the word, in Czech (tesat), Latin (texo), and other languages, seem to waver consistently between the two materials, but the sense of labour, of working with their warp and weft, does not change. It is also interesting to note that the Greek word is τέχνη, or tékhnê, which, in French, means manual art, manual skill, trade, industry. And Wikipédia then quotes Herodotus: τὴν τέχνην ἐπίστασθαι (Herodotus, Histories, Book 3, Thalia, 130) which translates as “knowing one’s trade.” We can close the loop by noting that the French word for loom, “métier,” also means “trade, professional occupation.” So, in effect, we weave on a trade.

First and foremost, for Bujold, it is a question more of the fundamental commitment to creating links and less of the medium that gets us there. Through her interest in the vernacular and popular art, the depth hidden behind her casual focus on the common and the banal,³ she found material for expression in women’s work – embroidering, weaving, sewing, everything that engages the body in the interlacing of correspondences to explore. All of tangible reality becomes meaningful only in these connections in a creative objective that is also intended to reveal them. Everything can be connected, as everything exists together and therefore inevitably engages in active conversation.

So, motifs are created, first by joining together patches of pieces. For instance, from tablecloths and curtains come checked shirts, dishtowels, washcloths, and even, perhaps, other tablecloths and curtains. This is how people of modest means recycle and save: the infinite reconversion of the same materials. Everything can and will be done with the world’s recycled and recyclable stuff. The total sum of fabric available may be limited, but the combinations are infinite.

Because these works of Bujold’s are based on the simplicity of means used, there are simple and logical figures, and also tiling. Later, in the video works, other elementary geometric figures are added, in configurations that combine strokes, squares, diamonds, and other shapes, all modulated in grids or arranged in various lines. There is always the grid, the classification – the sorting, one might say – for the material is sparse and must be assembled. As this is done, the material is not subjected to a hierarchy but deployed equipotentially in compartments in which, it seems, its diverse versions are equivalent. This, again, creates geometric figuration, adds to the global bazaar, even if there’s an attempt to order everything. So, making these combinations is arduous, difficult, a conquest to be constantly refought as materials, shapes, and things accumulate. Creating is incessant combat, and Bujold is well aware that it is always in vain. Thus, she allows us to see all the energy she expends on sorting through the world’s infinity, with motifs, things, and methods that might give a semblance of order and cohesion. But she does so in a way that lets us see that chaos is never far away and that it feeds the desire to regulate everything.

            This explains why the forms are kind of similar; the motifs, kind of similar; the materials, kind of varied and variable. The colours, primary in some projects, are foregrounded, and there is initially the question of their animation in different media, as they wax and wane in importance. And all of the works offer the mechanical singularity of different media, with their conditions of possibility – their own related singularity. This quality, obviously, is to be excavated, always and endlessly. It is what we find in Bujold’s sculptures, paintings,⁴ photographs, videos, and installations.

Video. Yes, exactly! It has become an important aspect of Bujold’s career in recent years. Her range of tools has thus expanded to include a medium that specifically measures the weft of reality, isolates fragments of singular space-time.⁵ Music also has its part to play, as we see in pieces such as HIT (2020–09), Métronomies (2022), and Études vidéographiques pour instruments à cordes (2015). In the first case, a performance by drummer Michel Langevin becomes an object of video trituration. Bujold takes full advantage of the medium’s possibilities for overlays. The musician’s movements are multiplied: the captures of his performances, reprised in figures that occupy the full screen, make sound and image vibrate in concert, each reciprocally stimulating the other’s rhythm. In the weft of these screens, figures appear – one might come gradually to recognize the instrument and its player. But above all, we see a painting of motifs. When undulations follow, we are able to distinguish the overall composition, how the activated whole is generated and animated.

Similarly, in Métronomies, the very form of the metronome, staunchly triangular, allows for various possibilities of representation. The scansion of the sound also generates an audio and image rhythm that is all-transcending. The same mastery is manifest in the variants created in Études vidéographiques pour instruments à cordes: reprises, gaps, scans, multiplications of the same image, an analogue taken up and woven into numerous different states forming motifs that create the whole, allowing animation, organizing diversification. All of these actions are manoeuvres made possible by the very mechanics of video – how it works on matter – by the technical potential that it contains within itself.

Then comes Métroscopies. Many of the videos in this series feature tiling or tracing of lines. Avatars of pixels emerge from the composition of images that is now fundamental – small specific points of the videographic work – and so do vertical lines, a souvenir of early videoscopic scanning. Bidden or unbidden, they weave in and out, creating the wefts of the image. Like the piecing together of petit point embroidery.

Lines, diamonds, and geometric forms in regulated groupings are the basic components of Bujold’s work. Their animation depends on the tékhnê specific to each medium. In the interweavings of the works appear their respective methods. But the basic components, nevertheless, are transversal; they are common to all the pieces shown. The preference for tékhnê is therefore perceptible throughout; it traverses the media for which it shows fairly constant praxeological conditions for composition of images and effects. But the mechanics specific to each ultimately emerge to give each work its own colour.

If we were to ask Bujold to speak plainly about what she does, she would no doubt say, “I keep busy, I keep busy. My hands and my head are always in the material composing figures, colours, lines, motifs. I keep busy ...”