Turning LEGO into Emotions: The Incredible Art of Katherine Duclos

Behind the most impressive LEGO sets – such as the Millennium Falcon, which consists of over 7,500 pieces – there are designers who started by building their own structures as children , and today work with advanced 3D tools to construct models for the most demanding collectors. Their task is to create not only a visually coherent whole, but also a structure that is stable, logical and possible to recreate step by step.

What if we approached the medium – in this case LEGO bricks – not just as a means to create faithful representations of reality, but as a space for intuition, emotions and personal stories?

This is the foundation of Katherine Duclos's work, which rejects established patterns in favor of expression, and her works - abstract, convex compositions enclosed in rectangular frames - balance between childish play and mature reflection.

Katherine Duclos - Sometimes the asymmetry is so subtle it's subversive 2024 / author's materials - katherineduclos.com

Lego as self-therapy and afterimages from blocks

The Duclos series began with her playing with her son, while the artist’s family life was undergoing turbulent changes in the background. Carefree stacking of blocks turned into a space of concentration and calm, where issues related to functioning on the autism spectrum — both hers and her son’s — were not without significance.

In the shared ritual of arranging, not only a form of closeness appeared, but also a way to tame chaos and restore inner balance . Although to the viewer the codes contained in the works may seem illegible or random, for Katherine they are a record of impressions and emotions - fragments of light, flashes of memories, traces of moments that were difficult to capture in any other way than in color, texture or reflection, which Strzemiński would call afterimages.

Katherine Duclos - I will ahead of you and scaffold the light so you can always see the path forward 2024 / author's materials - katherineduclos.com

At first glance, it is clear that Katherine Duclos’s color palette differs from that of typical LEGO sets. The artist paints the blocks herself before she even begins to arrange them, treating color as a starting point for the composition. The colors selected for the composition are sometimes muted, pastel, sometimes muted and earthy —more reminiscent of paint than plastic toy elements. Shades closer to nature enrich the works with an organic aspect that contrasts with the regularity of the material itself and emphasizes the sensory intention of the cycle of forms.

Katherine Duclos - It's been a long morning 2024 / author's materials - katherineduclos.com

Duclos has long published her work via Instagram, where her compositions, full of irregular structures and surprising color combinations, caught the attention of The LEGO Group, which invited her to collaborate on the Center for Creative Flow exhibition at Art Basel Miami in 2023. Due to the tight deadline, the artist had just six weeks to create more than 45 square feet of abstract structures. She succeeded, and the works, which were shown in the Miami exhibition, were soon transferred to LEGO headquarters in Massachusetts.

Katherine Duclos - Temper your touch please 2024 / author's materials - katherineduclos.com