Background Story

In 2007 I was invited to develop a temporary installation along the lines of Cumulous (2000) for the Cirque du Soleil headquarters in Montreal. By 2009 the initial idea had changed and Sylvie François, then cultural action director, offered an atrium with four skylights over a walkway where Cirque staff would normally go when they wanted a few minutes of quiet between meetings. By then I was incorporating mobile, transparent discs in my installations, shimmers of light which would almost disappear in shadow. I suggested a Cumulous-scale mass of such discs, using cut up water bottles in place of polyester sheets. I didn’t know then about the Cirque’s One Drop program, I was just trying to come up with a material that would be inexpensive and ubiquitous. Linda Tremblay, as my liaison with the Cirque, located a water bottle manufacturer who was willing to give us their rejects (saving them from landfill) and the artwork began to take shape. It was another fairy-tale heroine’s task of a project, with seven artists hired to work whatever hours they could to take, on tasks like cutting discs from the bottles, threading them together, attaching them to the metal frames, and then stabilizing them with more threads so they wouldn’t tangle in the constant air movement. I came up with a system using beading cord to make a less grid-like, more organic web for them to suspend from, and Louis Barrette made the frames. It was a big undertaking, years of planning and more than a year in production — long enough to form new friendships between those of us working on it, and old friendships to deepen. I am still grateful to my team-mates, Lalie Douglas, Carolyn Oord, Flower Lunn, Nancy McPhee, Adrienne Spier, Felicity Tayler, and Tiffany Blais. Sylvie François was a delight to work with and Linda Tremblay was incredible, rock-solid support throughout the whole capoté process. I based the layout under the skylights on a map of the Milky Way as it would be situated above Montreal, midsummer, but everyone referred to the clusters as clouds…