Sarah-Jeanne Landry

I am a visual artist whose works take the form of books. My work is rooted in the performative. My actions are woven into the very fabric of my daily life, and are carried out without inviting an audience. So I work with invisible performance, documenting it and putting it into a narrative. The protocols I develop act as laboratories in which to put to the test a feeling of inadequacy between the world and myself, which I increasingly understand to be linked to my neurodivergence. In this sense, they are part of an approach that is both poetic and autotheoretical. To document these micro-performances, I have explored various strategies for creating traces: collecting artefacts, automated video and photographic capture, voice recording, writing and verbatims. I then give form to these documents in the artist's book. By working in this way, I have developed an artistic and literary language based on the association of fragments, sensitive to friction, ambiguity and coincidence. My work therefore lies at the crossroads between literature, performance and conceptual art, all of which underpin an artist's book practice. Recently, I've been particularly interested in methods that make it possible to document action from as subjective a point of view as possible, in order to capture perceptions on the fly, to catch furtive thoughts.

Sarah-Jeanne Landry, Studio view, auto published/artist's books, 2024, © Sarah-Jeanne Landry

Installation view / Studio view
Showing a variety of artist's book created since 2020

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Sarah-Jeanne Landry, À propos de la parole, artist's book, 2023, © Sarah-Jeanne Landry

**My books are written in french**

À propos de la parole is the culmination of my research into the possibilities of documenting performance through text, from as subjective a point of view as possible, and of giving form to these traces in the artist's book.

Sometimes my ability to speak fades. My throat becomes knotted, my head empties, the words become tangled, the complexity of my inner experiences seems impossible to express. It intrigued me. I figures there was a knot to be explored here. To do this, I decided to make a daily audio recording of my voice, to record my thoughts about speech. This was to give me the means to both analyse and observe my speech, so that it could become both an object of study and a sensitive object.

This book compiles the verbatims of these recordings. It's important to note that the difficulty I have in existing serenely through speech has ramifications for my neurodivergence. This project therefore provides a glimpse into the sometimes painful process, riddled with bursts of joy, by which I have come to celebrate my autism.

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**my books are in french**

There's a wild island on the coast of Rimouski (Qc, Canada) called Îlet Canuel. While doing some research, I realised that it had been extensively studied by teams of biologists and botanists who had been making inventories of it since the 90s.

I wondered what it might mean to take an inventory of the island from my standpoint as an artist. I went to live on the island for a week, accompanied by my edition of La flore Laurentienne (the botanical reference in my region). The result was this series of little books.

In spending time in botanical writings, I was intrigued by a certain kind of accidental poetry that seems to be evoked by technical jargon when you don't understand it.

For this series of books, I placed my descriptions of plants observed in the field side by side with those of the same species in La flore Laurentienne, in order to discover what might emerge regarding expert and non-expert modes of language. My conclusion: botanists also say things like "beautiful blue corolla", and I find that endearing.

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