Inspired by the images of Mars transmitted in 2021 by the Perseverance rover, the artist envisions, through an autofictional approach, the journey of a woman to the Red Planet. In these oneiric visions, where reality and fiction intertwine, cosmic territories merge with her inner landscapes, inviting a poetic meditation on life’s fragility.
When the space mission confirmed the ancient presence of water in Jezero Crater, Mars—until then perceived as an arid and sterile celestial body—suddenly appeared as a territory that might once have harbored life. Marked by their strange familiarity, these images strike Catherine Bolduc’s imagination. The vertigo they provoke, and the contradictory feelings they evoke—between proximity and strangeness—inspired this series. The artist transposes onto this planet her visions of lush forests and vanished life forms. Yet these desiccated landscapes also mirror the accelerated image of an Earth grappling with its apocalyptic fate.
To explore this tension between cosmic wonder and ecological despair, Catherine Bolduc worked from images of Mars printed on watercolor paper, which she then altered through layers of pigments, cosmetic products, and printmaking techniques. Interventions in ultramarine blue across the ochre Martian surface allow water to reappear as a visual memory. Imprints of lace, touches of nail polish, and iridescent powders transform these landscapes into hybrid territories, where feminine adornment becomes a metaphor for the fragility of the world and the imminence of its disappearance.
In several works, abundant hair, waterfalls, craters, and labyrinthine structures inspired by the nervous system populate the surface. These gaps, glimmers, and transparencies embody both the dark zones of the psyche and the erased memories of the planet. Textures, patterns, and colors invoke the aesthetics of ornament, blurring the boundaries between cosmology, intimacy, and vanity.
The series also incorporates silhouettes of extinct birds and rare or endangered plants, which inhabit these imagined landscapes as witnesses to the inevitable cycle of appearance and disappearance.
By “dressing” and “making up” these territories, Catherine Bolduc offers a poetic reflection on the fragility of life, where the beauty of artifice dialogues with the awareness of finitude.
