Left blind after an accident, artist’s first solo show stars her guide dog

NEW YORK – How does it feel to have your life change in an instant?

Emilie Gossiaux was an art student at the Cooper Union in 2010 when she was hit by an 18-wheel truck while on her bike in Brooklyn.

She suffered a traumatic brain injury, a stroke and multiple fractures. While she ultimately regained her life, she had lost her sense of sight. She struggled to decide if she could, or even wanted to, continue making art.

“I had to adjust that framework in my head of what it means to be an artist,” said Gossiaux, now 34, who had always viewed her ability to draw and paint as “my absolute superpower”.

From age four, her favourite thing to do was copy cartoons on television. At five, she began to experience hearing loss, which only heightened her attention to images and facial expressions. “I just became more hyper-aware of using my vision,” said Gossiaux, who now wears hearing aids. “That was my way of learning and understanding.”

After the catastrophic accident that blinded her, she spent 11 months at a training centre called Blind Inc in Minneapolis, learning skills to navigate the world independently, including use of a white cane.

There, in a woodworking shop, she also learnt how to translate images in her mind using hand-to-hand, rather than eye-to-hand, coordination.

When sketching, she lays her paper on a rubber pad called a Sensational Blackboard that embosses the lines as she draws with one hand, following along with her other hand to feel the images. “I’m using one hand to ‘see’, the other hand to carve or draw or manipulate” the object, said Gossiaux, who did return to Cooper Union, where she graduated in 2014.

And she learnt to listen to her body and recognise the importance of rest, and of bed as a place to freely imagine her ideas. Only then did she feel she could really be an artist again.

“I allowed myself to sort of daydream about the work I wanted to make and not be so rigid,” said Gossiaux, petite and beatific, sitting in her studio at the Queens Museum, where she has been in residence for the past year on a Jerome Foundation Fellowship for Emerging Artists.

On Dec 6, her youthful dream came to fruition with the opening of Other-Worlding, her first solo museum exhibition, which runs through April 7. It celebrates her 13-year-old guide dog, London, and their mutual dependency. “I protect her and she protects me,” she said.

On a more universal scale, her art seems to remove barriers between animals and the rest of the natural world.

The installation consists of three papier-mache sculptures of hybridised dog-women – versions of London, scaled to Gossiaux’s height of 1.52m – dancing on their hind legs. They gambol around a maypole, which here is a monumentalised white cane. Fantastical and serene, the Londons hold colourful felt leashes that stream from the top of the 4.6m-tall cane, no longer constrained.

Brightly painted papier-mache flowers are strewn across the wide circular platform. Trees crowned with a canopy of 600 individually made papier-mache leaves wrap around the gallery walls like a 3D collage.

“The sheer joy that comes across in her work, it almost bounces off the page,” said Ms Sarah Cho, an assistant curator at the Queens Museum and a member of the jury that selected Gossiaux for the residency from among some 380 applicants. “There’s this vibrational movement in the way that flowers are drawn, the petals just seem to flutter.”

Gossiaux has worked with London, an English Labrador retriever, for 10 years and describes her as both “mischievous and a little bossy”.

Their bond strengthened when the artist started graduate school at Yale University in 2017, where she felt very alone for what she said was the first time.

“London became my constant,” she said. “I was really craving intimacy and closeness.”

She said her ongoing body of work featuring London has been influenced by American writer Donna Haraway, whose feminist theories look at cross-species relationships as a model for breaking down all kinds of hierarchies, whether patriarchal or economic.

Ms Cho said: “What if we didn’t centre the perspective all around humans? Emilie’s combination of animal and human bodies makes it almost feel like you’re there in this world with them.”

Gossiaux’s process always starts with drawing. She pulls from her visual, muscle and tactile memory.

“I know what London looks like because I’ve seen labradors before, but I’m also getting the sense of her body from petting her and playing with her, feeling her face,” said the artist, who always completes a drawing in one burst of energy. “I also draw from my dreams because they are still very vivid.”

When she translates drawings to sculpture, her life partner and studio assistant Kirby Thomas Kersels helps her measure and shape the pieces in styrofoam. Gossiaux layers on papier mache and then paints them, using her fingers rather than a paintbrush. “I’ve found ways to make it more of a tactile experience,” she said.

The artist will lead two “touch tours” of her installation at the museum for blind and low-vision visitors on Jan 21 and April 7. “I think of touch as a love language; it’s very intimate,” said Gossiaux, who worked as an educator at the Metropolitan Museum giving tours to visually disabled audiences for five years before the pandemic.

She considers herself an activist for disability justice, pointing out that for the first time in her work, she has included the white cane, a tool of her own independence.

“Being out in the world with my white cane, or with London, that would get in people’s way and annoy people,” she said. “But I feel like they’re denying my right to be there or to even exist.

“I want the white cane to be in people’s way,” she added, with gentle forcefulness. “I want it to take over the space.” NYTIMES