Robin Arseneault and Maura Doyle | IODAME

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Robin Arseneault and Maura Doyle, "IODAME"

Courtesy of the Gallery.

The phenomenon of being turned to stone appears in mythologies around the world. These stories offer explanations for aberrant geological formations and interpretations of cosmological phenomena. They also illustrate moral codes and the consequences of their transgression. 

In Greek mythology, Iodame was turned to stone for trespassing. Her name is a diminutive form of Io, who was transformed into a heifer, then cursed to wander the earth. Io is also associated with the moon, which roams the night sky. In the eighteenth century, Jupiter’s third largest Galilean moon was named after her. The lunar Io is primarily composed of silicate rock around a molten iron sulphide core, which produces over four hundred active volcanoes. The association between Io and the hot moon may draw from the ritual fire that was lit following Iodame’s ossification.

Stories of petrifaction draw analogies and contingencies between human, earthly, and celestial behaviour. In the lineage of Io, the tenets of feminine propriety align with the temperament of fire and the habits of the lunar cycle. 

Robin Arseneault and Maura Doyle are curious about these correlations. Each artist is sensitive to tools, materials and processes that may expand one’s awareness of how physiology and psychology are inflected by cultural, elemental and energetic pressures. The works in the exhibition bare traces of this attention. In myth, being turned to stone is a literal transfiguration. In Arseneault’s and Doyle’s work, the plasticity and paralysis of being is expressed in subtler shades of grey.

When clay is exposed to high levels of pressurized heat, it hardens into ceramic. It was first fired in open pits, where the object’s surface came into direct contact with burning debris. Under these conditions, the mineral properties of clay react with the chemical properties of burning debris to affect the ceramic’s colour, texture and markings. Doyle fires her sculptures in this method, inside a rusted oil barrel. She adds variations of sawdust, grass, leaves and foods rich in salt and soda to the hardwood fire. The smoky tones and speckled constellations of the ceramic’s finish arise from the improvisational nature of this firing method. Equally responsive are the artist’s hand-building techniques. The resulting sculptures possess formal irregularities and unique interior and exterior shapes, expressing a kind of material poetry that reflects fluctuations in the maker’s internal and external weather.

When carbon is exposed to high levels of pressurized heat, it hardens into graphite. This soft material sheds its iridescent mineral scales easily. Robin Arseneault works lightly and loosely with it in Spectral Maneuver (2022) to create transparent, buoyant shapes that appear as spectres of atomic, corporeal or gaseous matter. These apparitions accompany fragments of bodies in motion, cut from photographs in the book The World of Dance (1966). The disembodied gestures appear suspended between action and arrest, evoking states of hesitation, ambivalence or meditation.

The spherical concretions of Red Rock Coulee in southeastern Alberta were formed eighty million years ago, when the Western Interior Seaway covered the interior plains. A mineral cement of calcite and ironstone bonded deposits of aquatic debris that have withstood the erosion of the sandstone and shale around them. In her Double Healing (2018) series, Arseneault collages these geological formations alongside photographs of sculptures by Pierre Auguste Rodin, including Cariatide tombée portant sa pierre (Fallen caryatid carrying her stone, 1883–84). This symbolist work exposes the interiority of a caryatid—a pillar made in the form of a female figure—which supported ancient Grecian architecture and was revered as a symbol of youth, strength and duty. In contrast, Rodin’s sculpture portrays a fallen caryatid who has buckled under the weight of her psychic turmoil. 

The tension between the fortitude of geological time and the fallibility of biological life that Double Healing underscores mythologies of petrifaction. In unison with Spectral Maneuver and Doyle’s sculptures, they offer shape and substance to the enigmas of inner and outer worlds.