Playing Lego with her son, something 'clicked' for this Vancouver artist: she'd discovered the perfect medium

Earlier this fall, a special delivery arrived at Katherine Duclos's house in Vancouver. The contents? Roughly $7,000 worth of Lego, compliments of the Danish toy company. 

"It just took over the whole house. There were Lego bricks everywhere," says Duclos, a 43-year-old artist and mother of two young children: Augie, 7, and Nina, 4. "My kids are living the dream," she says, laughing, but the package wasn't for them — not exclusively, anyway. 

Duclos is a multidisciplinary artist, and she's never held fast to one format. Painting, sculpture, photography — even sheets of plastic bubble wrap — she'll use any medium to make work that explores her experience as an autistic woman and mother with ADHD. Since 2021, however, the artist, who earned an MFA at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, has become increasingly enamoured with Lego, which she uses to create abstract compositions that crackle with texture and colour. 

They've been well received in Vancouver. Her first series of Lego panels, made for a small exhibition at Kafka's, a cafe/gallery on the Emily Carr University campus, sold quickly, she says. More commissions and exhibition requests followed, including a solo show at This Gallery in the fall of 2022.

This summer, Duclos's Instagram got the attention of the toy company itself, and they hired her to produce a whole new body of work: five original pieces including her largest Lego canvas yet, a 10-foot-long abstracted landscape that's meant to suggest a nurse log in the B.C. woods. 

That collection debuted Friday at a three-day event for Art Week Miami Beach, and Duclos was flown out to create even more art on location, building with bricks while pop music producer (and art collector) Swizz Beatz MC'd the party.

But the story of how she got there didn't begin with a goal of partnering with a major toy brand. Rather, it started with a simple request from her son: will you play Lego with me?

"My son was about three or four when Lego bricks became a really intense interest for him. He just wanted to build all the time," says Duclos, whose children are also autistic. "The way that autistic kids tend to play is through parallel play … and so he always wanted me next to him when he was building. He wanted me doing it too," says Duclos.

Growing up, Duclos was never one for Lego, and she's actually never built a set by following the instructions. "My brain flips the diagrams," she says. But Augie showed her a whole new way to play. One day while building Legos at home, Augie had an idea. He'd selected four flat bricks, and shared them with his mom. Duclos remembers that moment: "'I thought you would like these colours next to each other,' he said. And I was like, 'Oh! I do!'"

"There was this 'aha moment.' I could use Lego in the same way that I use coloured paper or paint or all my other art mediums. It was like something just clicked," says Duclos. And she's been playing with Lego ever since, often with Augie and Nina by her side.

Prior to the assignment in Miami, Duclos would buy bricks second-hand, sometimes painting them to achieve the colourways she wanted. Her process always begins with colour.

"It's really about how colour informs how we feel," she says of the work. "I'm putting the colours together to get a palette that creates either a sense of place or a sense of a mood." The most recent compositions, for example, are meant to suggest different environments or time periods in nature.

Duclos applies a similar approach to colour when using other materials, but she's discovered that Lego is ideally suited to the way her mind works.

"I'm in sensory overload all the time," she says. "I'll notice two colours and they'll be across the street from each other, but my brain really wants them to be together." 

If I have an idea, I can just pick them up and start making immediately. There's no set up. There's very little clean-up — at least at my house.- Katherine Duclos, artist

So when Duclos puts Lego into a preferred sequence, her mind is calmed. "It's very regulating for me," says the artist, and as an added bonus, the smooth plastic bricks are pleasing to the touch. "For autistic people, a lot of us have sensory issues with touching certain materials," says Duclos. "I don't really love messy things. Like, glue is a problem for me. I love collage, in theory — and I do collage a lot — but the thing I don't like about the process is the stickiness."

"[Legos], for me, they're a great medium because they're immediate. If I have an idea, I can just pick them up and start making immediately. There's no set up. There's very little clean-up — at least at my house. They're out all the time," she laughs.

Since she started working with Lego, Duclos has noticed that people respond to the medium as strongly as she does. At a recent open studio event, held as part of Vancouver's Eastside Culture Crawl, Duclos observed visitors as they viewed her work.

"People just kept touching their fingers," she says, "like their fingers were having memories of touching the material." People tend to have the same response to the art she's made from other familiar items — bubble wrap, Perler beads, yarn — ordinary things that most of us have held in our hands at some point.

"There's a neuron that fires in our brain when we see something that we've touched before. We have a memory of it. And for an abstract artist, that's an incredible access point. That's a connection to a viewer where you don't have an image doing the work for you," says Duclos.

"I think that's why people respond to my work the way they do. They have a memory immediately. And those tactile memories from childhood are really powerful, I think."

And yet, most art isn't meant to be touched. For Duclos, that's a fact that needs to change, and she's not precious about her Lego works. As beautiful and delicate as they are, she doesn't mind if people run their fingers along every brick and baseplate.

"It's an accessibility issue," she says. "I have kids who need to touch things. It's not a want. … When [my daughter] touches things, it lets her know that she's there, that she exists, so she's constantly touching objects so that she will feel safer." 

And Duclos says she's driven by the need for greater accessibility in the arts. "I want to create exhibitions that include a sense of touch and tactility because for a large portion of the world, that's a part of the art experience that's very much missing, I think."

"I don't make art because I am talented as a painter," says Duclos. "I make art because I have endless, endless, endless ideas in response to materials."