Catherine Ocelot | Knitting with the threads of the heart

Cartoonist Catherine Ocelot continues her exploration of the human soul with Symptomsa tender and comforting fourth album knitted with the fine threads that connect us to each other.

Stephanie Morin
The Press

Four years after the release of the very beautiful album The artist’s life (Bédélys prize for the best Quebec comic strip in 2018), Catherine Ocelot brought out her pencils and her question marks. Because this artist with an exacerbated sensitivity prefers by far existential questions to ready-made answers. And uncomfortable doubts with unshakable certainties.

For her fourth opus, she dwells with the delicacy that characterizes her on the permanence of human relationships and the effects that these have on the body. “Initially, I intended to make an album about friendship, says the cartoonist. I had amassed several little stories over the years. I realized that there was a lot of loneliness in these stories. And with my editor, we also realized that, in Symptoms, many of my stories revolved around these invisible threads that connect us to others. »

She continues: “In this album, it is also a lot about the body, health and illness. How to be healthy, to be well, beyond exercising and eating well? These questions have interested me for a long time. Just like psychology. The people we meet have an influence on our health. The bond we have with ourselves and with others can be positive, but it can also undermine us. »

In Symptoms, we follow through interwoven tableaux five women, all members of the group Solitudes anonymes. There is Mireille, who has been so cut off from herself that she has cut herself off from others. Esther, who has too often drowned in the grief of her peers at the risk of disappearing. And Catherine, a somewhat hypochondriac comic book author, in search of her inner mother…

Autofiction? Yes and no

Is this Catherine on paper the same as the Catherine in flesh and blood who answers our questions? ” Yes and no. It’s autofiction, and it’s also a staging, invented stories. I like to play with these two dimensions, whether we don’t know what is true or not. But one thing is certain: like the character, I think it would be really fun to have the gang of Grey’s Anatomy ! I would feel really safe! »

Indeed, we feel the Catherine of blood and bones sometimes worried about health: her own, but especially that of her fellow men. Not for nothing that the question of loneliness is omnipresent in this album as delicate in the line as in the subject.

Over the course of her reading, the one who has already studied art therapy has also made astonishing discoveries which have fueled her thinking. “I read a text on the physical impact of an evening with friends a little pocket: the kind of evening where the current goes bad and where someone plays the devil’s advocate. We can measure the impacts on the body, such as the rise in cortisol, for several days! Studies have also revealed that experiencing great loneliness is equivalent to smoking between 15 and 20 cigarettes a day. Not being isolated is a contributing factor to health. Besides, there is a Ministry of Solitude in England…”

The body, we know, speaks to us. It sends us signals that unfortunately we don’t always listen to. “These metaphors of the body fascinate me. Just like our connection with dreams, the unconscious. All these threads that we carry inside us… In the album, there are also angels. It surprised me at first. Then I realized that there are also threads that connect us to those who are gone. Thinking of my grandmother still does my body good. I still carry it within me. »

Another recurring image in this very gentle album: the plants which, sometimes lush, sometimes withered, reveal the state of mind of those who rub shoulders with them. “We must preserve the threads that connect us to other humans, but also all those that unite us to what is alive. More than ever, we must become aware of the threads that exist between us and our environment…”

Symptoms

Catherine Ocelot

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280 pages