Yannick De Serre Resilience and Other Healings

Opening on Saturday, November 5, at 5 pm

Commented Visit of the Exhibition on November 19, 2022, at 2 pm

For the past 18 years, multidisciplinary artist Yannick De Serre has also practiced as a critical care nurse. He accompanies patients daily through the announcement of various diagnoses and treatments, acute and chronic illnesses, healing, loss of autonomy, births, death of loved ones, etc. Resilience and Other Healings addresses a significant aspect of his work: mortality. Since 2004, the beginning of his career in hospitals, De Serre has been recording and preserving every death he has encountered. For each patient who unfortunately passes away at his side, he sets in motion a post-mortem ritual and transposes this mourning into his artist's studio.   

At each departure, the artist acquires a symbolic object, a lace handkerchief embroidered with flowers. The handkerchief, a symbol of mourning and sadness after the loss of a loved one, lives alongside him in his daily creative art space. De Serre uses it to clean work surfaces and to wash his hands, and sometimes to wipe out his printmaking tools or to create monotypes. At the end of each year of work, the tissues are wrapped and preserved in a Japanese paper shroud: one bundle for each year of work completed. This ritual is repeated annually. At OBORO, De Serre presents the 17 shrouds he has designed since the beginning of his nursing career.  These seemingly fragile works dither between softness and brutality. It is in the act of contemplation, of both the subject matter and the material, that De Serre's work takes on its full meaning.   

Yannick De Serre would like to thank the artist-run centre OBORO and its entire team for making the presentation of this project possible. Without their patience and the multiple email exchanges, Resilience and Other Healings would not have achieved this visual materialization.

He also wishes to thank Émilie Granjon for writing the exhibition essay. Her exact, analytical writing put into perspective his nursing and artistic work of the last 18 years.

Finally, Yannick De Serre would also like to give a more personal thank you to his partner Alexandre Caron, whose daily support allowed the artist to concentrate on both his nursing and artistic work.