Robert Houle's spirituality is particularly apparent in The Place Where God Lives, in which colour fields are built up through a very intuitive and gestural application of pigment. The work was produced during a three-month artist-in-residency appointment at the Winnipeg Art Gallery in 1989. It consists of four large canvases, one each predominantly red, blue, green, and yellow. Abstractions inspired by Manitoba's natural environment, they are an intuitive visual response to the landscape and materialize almost as mystical impressions. These four paintings emerged from an earlier series of artworks entitled Parfleche for the Last Supper (1983). Among historical Plains cultures, the parfleche was a rawhide folded pouch, similar to an envelope. It was painted and decorated and used to carry personal and ceremonial objects. The parfleche has been a recurring image in Houle's artwork since 1980, when he began incorporating Aboriginal imagery into his compositions.

Parfleche for the Last Supper consists of thirteen small, handmade paper parfleche's representing the twelve apostles and Jesus. Each is painted and decorated to represent the personality of the figure it portrays. In The Place Where God Lives, Houle reuses the patterns from his Matthew, Philip, Thomas, and Bartholomew parfleche's. These appear in the white-grey line running across each of the paintings, which refers to the midpoint on the front of a parfleche where the two flaps meet. The space also serves to connect the individual works with a kind of horizon line.