Collection: Caroline Boileau

Caroline Boileau is a multidisciplinary artist, independent curator, and educator living in Montreal. She works from a feminist perspective, with a specific interest in health—intimate, public, social, and political. Her hybrid works are developed through a multidisciplinary practice that includes installation, drawing, video, and performance.

Since the mid-1990s, she has participated in numerous artist residencies, and her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions in Canada and internationally. She was the Michele Larose – William Osler Artist-in-Residence at the Osler Library of the History of Medicine at McGill University (2018–2019), and Artist-in-Residence with the Chaire McConnell – Université de Montréal en recherche-création sur la réappropriation de la maternité: libérer la parole des femmes (2020–2024)

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Caroline Boileau is a multidisciplinary artist, independent curator, and educator based in Montreal. Working from a feminist perspective with a specific interest in health—intimate, public, social, and political—she creates hybrid works developed through a multidisciplinary practice spanning installation, drawing, video, and performance.

The hybrid body and its many representations—particularly the female body—are recurring themes in her research, which draws on art history, the history of medicine and science, as well as current events. Through a dialogue with places, collections and objects, communities and individuals, her work seeks to reveal improbable cohabitations by proposing the poetic and political transformation of shared space.

In her drawing practice, she primarily uses watercolour, enriched with graphite, ink, and collage elements sourced from old literary and medical books. She links watercolour to performance, where each gesture on paper is irreversible and the coloured water rarely behaves as expected. She works with what emerges, somewhere between accident and intention, letting forms surface as hybrid beings in which life appears just beneath the skin.

Boileau strives to translate physical sensations—often invisible and inexpressible—by layering them with other representations of the body, and with animal, vegetal, and mineral characteristics. These complex systems move between the interior and exterior of the body, between physical and psychological states, between what is imagined and what is revealed. Through research, encounters with people, books, and places, she reclaims forms and images to transform and repair them, proposing new moults.

Paper as both surface and material, and drawing as a core practice, are at the heart of the projects she develops across sculpture, installation, performance, and video.

The notions of dialogue, metamorphosis, and “appearing things” (a term borrowed from Georges Didi-Huberman) are central to the way she approaches the many facets of artistic practice. For Boileau, the possibility of metamorphosis is both a feminist tool and a driving force. She seeks to transform how she approaches work, collaboration, and mutual support. Her practice is a form of care for the living.