The woman who saw the bear is a long-term project which paints an intimate portrait of Lucille Côté. With a silver mane and candid demeanor, Lucille practices a craft that has long been the exclusive domain of men: Taxidermy. Inspired by the aesthetics of natural history museums and rooted in the Saguenay forests (in Quebec, Canada), this ever-evolving project seeks to convey Lucille's everyday life through the seasons as a woman taxidermist living amongst wolves.
In a remote village set in the wilderness of the Northern Quebec boreal forest lives Lucille Côté, a 60 year-old atypical woman. For four decades, she has been hunting and stuffing animals. In her little wooden house, Lucille lives amongst hundreds of stuffed specimens which keep her company and fill her home with singular joy and life.
Being far and disconnected from the feminist movements which have shaken Quebec's traditional lifestyle since the 1970s, Lucille is doing her own kind of revolution by being the only female taxidermist of the whole Saguenay region. Facing the pressure of male hunters and taxidermists who try to make her feel like an outsider, she resists in her own soft and stubborn way, practicing her craft with love, care and poetry, not paying much attention to what the others say.
Living amongst wild animals, Lucille is herself quite lonely and untamable. In order to gain her confidence, I spent almost two year visiting Lucille with frequency, capturing her in the intimacy of her home and the immense beauty of the forest. Also a woman in a traditionally male-dominated field, I developed a true friendship with Lucille, which led the way to an open-hearted, woman-to-woman dialogue about life, death, art, transcendence and what it means to be a woman in a man's world. The essay reveals an incredibly wise and touching character, who underneath the simplicity of her looks and way of speaking, has overcome a great deal of personal and professional obstacles and has got a lot to share with the world.
As part of a larger artistic project involving a common exhibition showing my photography work together with a selection of Lucille's stuffed animals (showed in Quebec in 2015), as well as a 17-minute documentary, the multimedia essay combining photo, video and audio excerpts focuses mainly on Lucille's evolution as a woman practicing a craft that was traditionally exclusively reserved to men.
