Aidan Dupuis

Throughout their work, Aidan Dupuis explores narratives of intergenerational healing, identity formation, and cognition. Their approaches are frequently mixed-media, centering drawing, printmaking, and textile practices. Most recently, they’ve experimented with sculptural and installation practices with printmaking. They are now working on a long-term project titled “The Picture Book”, studying how layers of narrative modify one another when superimposed, and they’re working to become an adept knitter.

The inheritance, 2025

She encouraged me to get one of my own, an elfin quilted thing, just warm enough for quick November treks across campus. So many stitch together. She remembers the day they bought his, how cold he’d get on job sites without one, how he’s always needed reminders to take care. He’s more practically minded than me, forever pragmatic, though his mind is fecund with ideals. He sees mycelium connections across the universe and threads that equilibrate us. We balance atop them. He feels that our world suppurates constantly and that we need to work to save it. He’s bumptious and a forceful foehn rolling through us. If we’re stood on a slackline, he’s tugging it tighter, drawing it in to himself.

The shrug, 2024

And upon lowering the orb, he realized it was only ever a small stone in a vast ocean. All those promises were nothing more than just that, and when vacating the space, Galt was forced into a confrontation with the image he'd built up of himself. The steel was never his own original contribution to the world, it took legions to develop, historic forebearers of knowledge that he relied upon and discarded. Certainly the stone was heavy, but it never amounted to the vastness of the earth that his feet had always been planted firmly upon, never been held up by his hands alone. In the ocean there is no such thing as an individual; fungal spores are carried by tides, which populate and reoxygenate far-off regions; kelp sprout on every spare surface there and are then scratched off and eaten up by crustaceans. Held above the water his stone never supported these blooms. After the shrug, his perfect vision fell apart and he learned that he was only ever passing through, none of this was his, and none of it would remember him in five score. Tides will erode him and his stone together until their matters are both subsumed within new organisms and kinder bacteria.