Contemporary Art in Context: Katherine Duclos

Few toys are more iconic than LEGO® interlocking bricks, which have been enormously popular since their introduction in Denmark in 1949. In recent decades, many artists have used LEGO bricks to create innovative works of art. Katherine Duclos, a multidisciplinary artist, transforms LEGO bricks into abstract compositions that reflect her engagement with her family, childhood memories, and her experiences as a neurodivergent woman and mother. Since 2022, she has also transitioned her keen eye for brilliant color combinations into installations and compositions of painted, layered window screens.

Modules of Color
Duclos’s affinity for LEGO bricks as an art material comes from a private moment in 2021 when her autistic four-year-old son offered her a LEGO arrangement in bright colors as a gift. Her own neurodivergent condition inhibited her sense of spatial organization and ability to follow LEGO instructions to create 3D constructions, leading her to develop the alternative process of using the bricks as modules of color, much like collage papers or pigment, as seen in Where There Are Roots. As an autistic-ADHD artist, the very act of relying on tactile arrangement by color grounds her process. Duclos states that she never plans her works; rather, she allows each brick to determine which to put down next, establishing an internal rhythm.

Her early works were irregular shapes on small bases paired with colored paper backgrounds. She ultimately transitioned to arrangements attached to wooden panels, as in Where There Are Roots. She now frequently paints her LEGO pieces, explaining that some of her favorite LEGO colors have been discontinued. Her palette reflects colors and light conditions she associates with her former home in Massachusetts, confirming her lifelong connection to vibrant color as an anchor.

Installing Memories
Duclos began creating her window screen artworks in 2022, and they are still evolving today. These works were inspired by her childhood memories of staring out the window and allowing the window screen to blur the colors and forms outside as she spaced out, a frequent occurrence before she was diagnosed as neurodivergent. She frequently brings a supply of window screen with her when she explores nature, devising installations in the outdoors with the brightly colored, overlapping screens. This reenacts the childhood memory of the screen as a blurring medium between the indoor and outdoor worlds. When she is finished with the installations, she repurposes the screens into mounted compositions.

The forest installation pictured in this article was photographed during a hike in Squamish, British Columbia. Duclos also created installations in her childhood yard in Newburyport, where her vision for the blurred-screen compositions formed.

Art History: LEGO Bricks as Fine Art
The LEGO name comes from the Danish leg godt, which translates to “play well.” LEGO bricks have long been popular among children, and by the twenty-first century, they had become a medium for many professional artists to create complex installations and sculptures. Ekow Nimako (b. 1979) is a Ghanaian Canadian artist who creates large-scale sculptures out of black LEGO elements. Nathan Sawaya (b. 1973) is particularly renowned for his large LEGO recreations of historical marble sculptures. Mariann Asanuma is recognized as the first dedicated LEGO artist and the first female Master Model Builder at LEGOLAND in California. There are many LEGO museums and discovery centers around the world. The LEGO company markets art kits for both children and adults that recreate famous historical works of art, such as Hokusai’s (1760–1849) Great Wave and Vincent van Gogh’s (1853–1890) Sunflowers.

About the Artist
Katherine Duclos was born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, in 1980. As a child, she discovered an affinity for working with color, spending hours arranging colored wooden blocks on the floor into intricate mosaics. She received an MFA in painting and drawing from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 2012. After graduation, she missed being surrounded by nature’s colors and sounds, so her family moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, in 2017. She discovered her own autistic-ADHD neurodivergence in her forties after both her children were diagnosed as autistic. She developed her LEGO skills while acting as her son’s parallel play co-regulator, with LEGO bricks his preferred toy.

Her unconventional use of LEGO as art led Duclos to her first show in 2023, collaborating with the LEGO Group for their Miami Art Basel Center for Creative Flow in Miami. She created over 4.2 square meters (45 square feet) of abstract color constructions on wood panels. The work now lives in the LEGO Group’s headquarters in Massachusetts. A 2024 documentary, Small Tiny Starts, was released on LEGO’s YouTube channel. It delves into Duclos’s incredible artistic journey and her family dynamic.

Top: What were you doing back there anyway, 2024. Paint on felt-covered bulletin board with painted window screens, 18 x 24" (46 x 61 cm). From the artist: “This work is part of an ongoing series delving back into my solitary outdoor play in the 1980s and 90s. The window screen acts as time and memory obscuring the places I am trying to paint from recall.” Bottom: After lifting two screens of What were you doing back there anyway, both of which have their own paintings, the underlying painting on felt is revealed, a drastically different view than what initially greets viewers. The tactility of this piece and viewers being invited to touch acts as an invitation to Duclos' inner childhood world.

ARTIST Q&A
What are some of the biggest influences on your work?
KD: My practice is probably most influenced by my children right now. I am a full-time parent to two autistic children, and they have remade me completely as a person and artist. They experience the world through all of their senses in such deep, pure ways. They are the reason most of my work is tactile now. How can artists remove touch? If we consider children, we should not do this. Touch is how so many learn, and my children have taught me it’s a bit ableist and controlling of adults to say what children can and cannot touch. My kids have such unique, singular perspectives, that it has forced me to realize that my own perspective is just mine. It is not correct or better, just my own, and I have no right to force it on others. This has been the biggest impacting factor on my work, I think. My children disarmed my ego and introduced autonomy to our lives.

But, before I had kids who forced me to respond to the moment, I looked at a lot of photography. Photography is so important because it shows us what is, not what we want to be, which is what painting does. I looked at so many photos as a kid. My favorite photographer is Aaron Siskind. He took photos of things he saw out in nature and in cities and he didn’t care whether they were remarkable things. Most were simple things most people wouldn’t notice. His work opened a lot of everyday magic for me.

What is a typical workday like for you?
KD: My days start with my kids waking me up. And then the work is tending to them until I don’t have to anymore. Sometimes they go to school, sometimes they don’t. My kids get to choose most of their existence because I think they should have some say in their experience. They choose to go to school most days, but I always have to be ready to pick them up on short notice.

Many days I go to my two studio spaces, which are about a ten-minute drive from my house. I have one space full of finished work that acts as sort of a very full gallery. The other space is a complete and total mess and it’s called “Always in Progress,” and it is my project space. This is where I work out ideas and do big work. I try to work on something creative every day until my kids get out of school. Then I revert back to being a parent. After they go to bed, I become an artist again and often continue working at home on ideas that began in the studio. I do almost nothing else besides parenting and making art.

Do you have specific strategies, rituals, or routines that help you work and/or generate ideas?
KD: I do not know how to turn my ideas off. I do not need rituals or routines to generate ideas; my brain is like a fountain that never stops running. I cannot make it stop except when I am working on one of the ideas. That is why I work all the time, to quiet the fountain. I say, Yes, yes, I’m working on it all, to try to make it hush.

Every time I see a material, I want to remake it, transform it, intervene somehow. I cannot stop myself from intervening. This is the definition of an artist, I think—a person who gives themselves permission to act on a material or problem. My problem is organizing and following through with my ideas. But even that, I have gotten better at, now that I have stopped trying to be perfect or what other people expect. It’s okay to leave an idea, to admit it didn’t work. Mistakes are never wastes of time; they always get me where I need to be in the end. I have found if you plan for a certain expectation, you’re more likely to be disappointed if those mistakes happen. But if instead you don’t plan for a specific outcome, the mistake is just a thing that happens in the process, not a setback. Expectation is the opposite of creativity.

Do you feel that a certain medium has conveyed your messages better than others? Or do you have a preferred medium/materials that you like to work with the most?
KD: Every medium has to be up to the task of expressing what you’re asking. I am a multimedia artist, so I bounce between mediums and mix materials freely. To be bound to a material is to be bound, and I won’t limit my ability to express by tying myself to one way of saying something. Art is multiple visual languages that can be understood from many different contexts. The multiplicity is part of the point. If I say something in paint, someone near me may read it very differently than someone far from me whose experience in life has been different. I have come to understand my job as an artist is not to always proclaim my truth or my ideas, but instead to gather enough materials to build works that channel or reflect what is happening right now, from multiple points of view, not just my own.

I have materials I enjoy more from a sensory standpoint. LEGO is very satisfying for me because it is dry and I hate sticky, messy things. The immediacy of it is also nice. I can build without much setup or cleanup. They are very direct, and I appreciate that. I can also undo them so easily and they have and lack permanence, like us, so I appreciate that. But sometimes they are far too hard, far too geometric, far too physical to convey a more ephemeral message. I like window screen for that, for challenging our perception of things, for making us look twice. Both materials inspire people to want to touch the work because most people have touched both LEGO and window screen, so there is a tactile memory there I access when I use familiar materials. It helps create an access point for whatever message I am trying to convey. By starting with familiar materials, I immediately tell viewers that my work is within their grasp, not above them, not better than them. This is the most important use of materials for me.

If you could go back in time, what advice would you give yourself as an emerging artist?
KD: I almost didn’t get to do my thesis because I was told my style was not cohesive or predictable. If I could go back, I would tell myself I was on the right track by annoying my professors. They told me I didn’t understand color and should stick to neutrals. I listened for almost ten years. And then I realized I had just been afraid to make statements others wouldn’t find appealing. I was afraid to say anything that might make me less likeable or accepted. My work showed that. It was tentative and pleasing and safe. Many female artists make work that is visually appealing because they are told from an early age that prettiness matters so much. It doesn’t. Being real matters, authenticity. Not being pretty. If I could go back, I’d give myself permission to make the work I needed to make that maybe wouldn’t have pleased anyone but myself.

What are you working on currently? Can you share any upcoming projects with our readers?
KD: I have a show in January through March in a 1400-square-foot gallery that I get to fill however I want. For one and a half years I’ve been working on many large-scale window screen paintings that will be hung from the ceiling and small structures that are moveable. I’ve gathered many materials for this show, including lots of vintage crochet lace I’ve hand-dyed and painted and turned into sculptural forms. There will be sculptures throughout, some moveable like treasures that can be arranged. Viewfinders, mirrors, flashlights—different ways of investigating the work will be provided. Visitors will be able to rearrange the exhibit to some extent, creating their own visual lines and intervening in the materials, as I do, to further reveal all the ways that interaction with others is an inevitable part of our experience. We are not independent creatures but rather a very codependent species. I’d like my work to reflect on that codependency and our need to better work together to create spaces where multiple perspectives can exist at once in peace without hierarchy. This show will be very much geared toward children and how they experience the world. I want adults to remember what it was like to have wonder, to think you could affect change, to be curious and to want to touch.

Color as an Anchor