Programming

Kathleen Houston's artistic process is closely linked to a shamanic experience of understanding the world, an experience aiming at "a knowledge located beyond the general understanding of humans "¹. This process, which has been ongoing for the past three years, is defined by the artist as a dialogue or communion with the spirits and the healing power of nature in order to reappropriate a psychic and ecological well-being. It is also a process of affirmation of the artist's feminine identity and a questioning of the relationship between public and private space.

Salmon skin, soulskin is the title given to a set of works in which performance, video, photography and a set of artifacts arranged in the form of an installation are brought together. This exhibition presents the traces of a quest for a "spiritual skin of healing", a quest that was carried out notably through a series of solitary performances in ephemeral installations (most of them in outdoor sites) where salmon and clay were used. During these solitary performances, the video camera played the role of companion and mirror for the artist. Furthermore, the artist sees photography and video as a means of creating a "membrane/image" between the world here and the extra-ordinary reality of the shamanic space. As a metaphor for spiritual skin, Houston offers the viewer a felted lambswool "skin" to don in order to compensate for the sensory absence of her private and past performances. The spiritual skin joins the notion of transformational skin and corresponds in varying degrees to the process of transformation of artistic action. For Kathleen Houston, to create is to learn, and this implies for her a belief in the process she has adopted to signify her research.

¹ Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women who run with the wolves, Ballantine, 1992, p.32.