Lucie Doremus-Cook

Within my studio practice, I explore spaces where boundaries dissolve. Between place, memory, language and image, presence and absence. I am drawn to spaces that resist full understanding yet hold an established emotional space of their own. The Möbius strip appears throughout my work as both a metaphor and reoccurring motif, suggesting that opposing binaries such as subject/object, inside/outside, subconscious/conscious are not fixed binaries, but continuous and entangled states.

I work primarily through remembered landscapes, often returning to the fields, floods and sand dunes connected to my childhood. Writing is central to my practice and often acts as the starting point for making; language becomes a way of navigating memory before it is visually translated. At the same time, language itself plays a key role in my work, shaped by experiences of displacement within my bilingual upbringing. I am interested in the forms of “otherness” that emerge through mistranslation, fragmented communication, dying languages, and the ways language can both reveal and conceal meaning.

My process is intuitive and materially driven. Through painting, I push and manipulate surfaces to the edge of concealment and revelation, allowing images to emerge and reform. Colour is used instinctively or drawn from sensory memory – sometimes intentionally artificial, other times starkly familiar, depending on if the landscape I am depicting is from personal memory or inherited imagery. To be able to reuse and reclaim materials is also an important part of my practice. I incorporate found wood , paper scraps, and passed-down fabrics as a way of re-worlding materials and extending their histories. Through this process, I aim to create works that feel suspended between memory and landscape, permanence and disappearance.