Louise Durocher Evokes Human Emotion In Her Work

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Louise Durocher

Besides sculpture, Durocher’s artistic practice includes monotype printmaking. She began exploring the medium nearly a decade ago as a way of representing her work in two dimensions.

What I do for a living isn’t work, it’s a way of life,” says sculptor Louise Durocher. “I became interested in art, especially sculpture, as a child.” Her passion has only grown with time. The Montreal-born, Seattle-based artist first worked with soft materials, including clay, but later shifted to stone, which required a discipline she found pleasing. “Stone requires commitment to your vision since once it’s taken off, it cannot be put back on,” Durocher says. As her affinity for the material deepened, so did the reality of making a living, and she enrolled at the University of Washington to study architecture and landscape architecture. “They were just different mediums to sculpt with,” she explains.

These days, Durocher is shifting away from the demands of her international architecture practice, Archimonde, to focus more exclusively on her artwork, whose style she describes as contemporary figurative. “Humans and their emotions–states of mind–are my main subjects,” she says. Over the last 18 years, she has visited Pietrasanta, Italy, to buy marble and work in a rented studio, but it wasn’t until a trip two years ago that she began her first monumental figural piece, Ubusu–measuring some 9 feet tall and weighing 9,000 pounds. The sculpture now presides over her Seattle studio. This winter she returned to Pietrasanta to begin a new large-scale piece, One Way Conversation. “Life in a small village inspires me,” she says. “It has a different rhythm–there is time to live and think.”

These days, Durocher is shifting away from the demands of her international architecture practice, Archimonde, to focus more exclusively on her artwork, whose style she describes as contemporary figurative. “Humans and their emotions–states of mind–are my main subjects,” she says. Over the last 18 years, she has visited Pietrasanta, Italy, to buy marble and work in a rented studio, but it wasn’t until a trip two years ago that she began her first monumental figural piece, Ubusu–measuring some 9 feet tall and weighing 9,000 pounds. The sculpture now presides over her Seattle studio. This winter she returned to Pietrasanta to begin a new large-scale piece, One Way Conversation. “Life in a small village inspires me,” she says. “It has a different rhythm–there is time to live and think.”

Louise Durocher

This piece, Rock to Sleep, is made of black marble with white-and-peach veining on a powder-coated steel bed

Louise Durocher

Louise Durocher

The artist's airy 1,700-square-foot studio is filled with stone awaiting carving.

Louise Durocher

Sculptor Louise Durocher carved her monumental work Ubusu in Pietrasanta, Italy, from two blocks of Carrara Bianco marble. The sculpture, her largest to date, now resides in her Seattle studio.

Louise Durocher

Louise Durocher

For Durocher printmaking offers her a sense of immediate gratification--unlike her undertakings in stone--and is a complementary element in her artistic life.

Louise Durocher

Her two-dimensional efforts share a similarly abstract sensibility with her sculptures.

Louise Durocher

A large printing press fills part of her studio.

Louise Durocher

Facing the Truth stands at the entrance.

Back in Seattle, with One Way Conservation shipped to her studio for completion, Durocher is settling back into her routine. She arrives in the studio early, turns on music, makes an espresso, and identifies which piece to work on first. “I usually work on five to six sculptures at the same time, so if I have an impasse with one, I move to another. While working, I observe the problematic piece across the room and eventually find the solution and go back to it,” she says. Lunch is prepared in the studio kitchen and enjoyed in the garden–a meditative pause before returning to the studio to work with few interruptions until sundown. “I turn my phone off,” she says, noting that she only reads messages and emails during her midday break and after six at night. Evenings are spent at home in her historic house on Queen Anne. “It was added onto after a fire, so I can only describe the style as eclectic,” she says with a laugh. She remodeled the kitchen, her favorite room, on memories of her grandmother’s home in Montreal. “Cooking is important for me. It’s creative and clears my mind.”

And with human emotions as Durocher’s primary subject, clarity is key. Her piece Esther celebrates the strength of women facing breast cancer. “People told me they understood how the sculpture ‘felt’ because they’d been there, or their mother, wife or daughter had been there,” she says. People told Durocher it had a healing effect on them, which in turn had a profound effect on her. “Art is so important in everybody’s life,” she says, revealing a new interest in creating public works. “I’ve been fortunate to have a career doing what I love most and I’d like my work to be used to enhance the lives of anyone who relates to it.”