“Hi, my name is Sophie Derouin. I’m an artist living in Centretown, currently finishing my first year at SPAO and I have my BFA from the University of Ottawa. I’m a photography-based artist, I use cyanotype film process to explore themes of home and our body, how we move through spaces, and our experiences in community and domestic spaces.
I also am a part of the Friend of a Friend Collective in Ottawa. It’s an artist collective where we’ve hosted events. We’re currently working on a book for an exhibition that we did a couple months back, which the book will be launching at Possible Worlds Object Project Book Fair.
And we’re also looking for artists for a backyard show in the early summer, so we’ll be doing a call-out for that sometime soon. It’s similar to the residency and art show Upstairs at Madeleine’s apartment in Centretown where 25 artists were invited to spend time and develop their art. I don’t know if I’ll have people living in my apartment, but it’s really just like spending time in the space and speaking with other artists to help you create something, and have something grow from it.
So that’s how we ran the Upstairs residency, the one in the backyard would probably be a little bit different because we can’t all sleep in a backyard, but it’s still a place where we can hang out and I think will inspire people in a different way than the inside of an apartment would.
From the past residency, I met so many people that I maybe had heard of or that I even just didn’t even know existed. I think we could do the same here.
There’s plenty more artists I’ve met a ton since then that are really incredible.
I think that would definitely be the goal for them to meet other people.
I think a lot of artists don’t really know how to get started in the community.
I felt that way for a long time, even though I was in school at the university doing my BFA surrounded by so many people.
I don’t know if it’s just that we need time out of school, but everyone’s come back together to create something really beautiful, so I don’t know if that explains what a residency is.
A residency feels very formal, like something that you need to apply to and pay for and travel to, but you can also just make it up.
I’m also opening up my schedule to do some scanning and digitizing for people, so anyone that has film laying around or if you have like a big family archive of photographs that need to be scanned or film that needs to be digitized, organized in folders by year or whatever it is, I’m gonna start doing that.
I grew up very like surrounded by artists, my grandma’s an artist, her brother was a very famous artist, there’s a lot of photographers in my family, so at a very young age I was able to accumulate film cameras and start shooting and developing film and I think after doing years of, like I’ve done painting and drawing and the more, I don’t know if traditional art is a good way to put it, but what someone immediately thinks of when they think of art.
I just kind of went from there, I think in university I was given a really good amount of space and time to explore that and try different mediums, a lot of alternate process stuff. I found it really difficult in university to choose photography as a medium and stick to it, it felt like it wasn’t enough and alternate processes, film kind of gave me a route out of that feeling and it also motivated me to create, so obviously I was going to follow that path, but I think photography is kind of what we see the most of and sometimes it feels a little oversaturated and it’s hard to, it was hard for me to feel like it was enough, so film and cyanotype helped me kind of fill in that hole.
Cyanotype is an alternate process which basically means developing a photograph in a different kind of way, similarly to how you would in the dark room, but with different chemicals and without an enlarger.
You can do it with the sun, I know a lot of people who have fun with that and then you can also do it with an intense UV light. I know sometimes it feels like, when I say photo-based artist, I don’t even know if that’s the right term, but in the right family of language, so I can also just use kind of like artist I guess to encapsulate all of that.
I guess the only downside with film is how expensive it gets, but it’s fun, I feel like it’s very experimental and you know what to expect after you get used to it, but it still surprises you in really strange ways and there’s always more to explore and try out.
I’m looking at this now and it’s really interesting that you’ll be shooting me in the space that this has been shot in, so it’s kind of meta.
After my BFA, I didn’t really do anything for a little bit. I was tired and I didn’t really want to create, I just worked and then I moved to another city for a little while and even though it was a really incredible experience, for some reason Ottawa was calling my name, so I came back and my community was very welcoming, even though I had left for a year and hadn’t really been back in the city and yeah I feel like essentially right when I came back all these really cool projects started happening and kind of made me feel like, oh now I know that I’m where I need to be and since then we’ve just been developing as a collective and creating more projects, meeting with different artists, meeting different people. So yeah, Centretown is very important to my practice just because it’s where my community is and I think there’s a lot more artists than we realize in Centretown too.
Yeah, for the Friend of a Friend Collective we’ll be looking for artists in, I guess later in the spring, early summer for a backyard show that we want to put on and we’ll also put a call out soon for a zine, for artists for a zine.
We’ve called it Contact zine and essentially instead of making like photo dumps on Instagram, we were thinking it could be kind of fun to put it on paper and like put these amalgamations of photographs into a contact sheet in a zine so that way you can kind of see the work that people make but that doesn’t get shown and I think we all accumulate so many photographs, it’s a great way to share the ones that don’t get any sunshine ever.
So that will be later in the year or in the summer as well which will be kind of fun.”
Sophie Derouin
Photography-based Artist
@friendofafriend_co
