'Clipped Wings' and a Sense of Freedom with Sandra Chevrier

Your paintings bring together comic-book imagery and portraiture, creating an ongoing dialogue between fiction and reality. How do you decide which comic imagery to incorporate into each painting? Do you draw from a personal collection, and does your selection process relate to the individual portrait or something else you’re seeking to convey?

I have a drawer filled with thousands of comic books. I have always been drawn to the contradictions within them: the vulnerability hidden behind strength, the fragility of heroes, and the myths we inherit without questioning.

My choices often begin with colour, an expression, or the tension between an image and the woman beneath it. A symbol of strength might be wounded; a protector might need protection. In Clipped Wings, some of these images burn and disappear into the flames, becoming fragments of a mythology being dismantled.

I see these images as memories embedded in the skin, somewhere between fiction and reality. I am interested in what happens when the stories we grew up with begin to reveal something about who we are.

Dualities of freedom and restraint feel particularly present throughout Clipped Wings, from the figures in your paintings to the recurring imagery of birds. Could you talk about how these themes have developed within this body of work, and what the birds represent to you?

I have always found it deeply troubling to see birds in cages, deprived of the freedom to fly. During my college years, I discovered Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Portrait of Henri Matisse (Vence, France). Matisse sits in a room surrounded by empty birdcages, while birds perch above them. That image profoundly affected me and influenced the trajectory of my artistic language. The birds were no longer confined; they existed beyond the structures that once held them. To me, this represented a kind of ultimate freedom. The photograph eventually inspired the logo I created for my company, and it became an important reference for Clipped Wings.

Over the years, the Cage has evolved from a visible structure into something more internal: expectations, relationships, inherited narratives, and the images we construct of ourselves. In this exhibition, the Cage dissolves, explodes and burns. Yet fire holds a contradiction: it liberates the women, consuming the invisible boundaries that shaped them, while threatening the birds, symbols of the freedom we long for.

I am interested in this fragile space between destruction and release. Freedom is not always gentle, and breaking free does not mean emerging untouched. Sometimes, it means learning to fly with damaged wings.

We love the salon-style hang in this exhibition, particularly the inclusion of sketches and bird studies, which offer a different perspective on your practice. How do these smaller framed pieces fit into your wider process, and what do they allow you to explore which might be different from your larger paintings?

The frame has always fascinated me because it can both elevate and imprison an image. It preserves something precious while establishing boundaries around it. In this sense, the frame becomes another form of the Cage.

The smaller works offer a more intimate expression of an idea. A sketch or bird study can remain a fragment, a trace, a possibility, without needing to become a fully resolved painting. I love placing these contemporary, sometimes fragile images inside ornate antique frames. There is a contradiction in their beauty: they elevate the subject while simultaneously containing it. The image becomes something precious to be preserved, but also something confined.

In the salon-style installation, the works enter into conversation with one another, creating a larger narrative from individual fragments. The frames themselves become part of that narrative, questioning the thin line between preservation and imprisonment.

I am drawn to images that blur the boundaries between fiction and reality, from cinema and photography to painting, fairy tales and childhood memories. Who Framed Roger Rabbit, where cartoons and humans inhabit the same world, is one example of this collision.

I am equally fascinated by the stories hidden within ordinary images: a gesture, a photograph, or a sculpture encountered in a Paris park. Sometimes a single image can suggest an entire narrative without explaining it.

I am also interested in the stories we tell ourselves about women. We often hear that women are their own worst enemies, that we compete with one another or hold each other back. I want to explore the opposite: the beauty and strength that emerge when women lift one another up. In my work, the hero can fall, the woman can become the protector, and the figure who once occupied the background can take centre stage. Strength no longer needs to mean standing alone.

When the world burns, we become each other’s shelter. Some storms cannot be stopped. Some wounds cannot be undone. Still, we hold on. Perhaps strength is not the power to withstand everything, but the courage to remain tender in a world that keeps breaking us.

The last time you exhibited with us was in 2018, and it’s fascinating to see how your practice has evolved since then. The luminosity in this new body of work feels particularly striking, especially in the interplay of light and fire. What has shifted in your approach over the past eight years, and what feels different for you about Clipped Wings compared to your previous work?

The questions that drive my work remain, but my relationship with them has changed. The Cage has evolved from a visible structure of confinement into something more fragmented and internal: the expectations, memories and inherited stories that shape our identities.

I have become more willing to let different materials and visual languages collide, allowing the work to exist somewhere between image and "object". Fire has become central to this evolution. It illuminates, destroys and transforms. In these paintings, the flames consume the Cage around the woman, not the woman herself.

What feels different about Clipped Wings is it's emotional energy. Vulnerability and pain remain, but there is also exhilaration, movement and possibility. The women are no longer simply confronting their confinement; they are beginning to imagine what lies beyond it.

I see this exhibition as another chapter in the Cage series, one in which the question shifts from how we escape to what becomes possible once the structures that defined us begin to fall apart.

Every new body of work brings its own challenges. Were there any particular difficulties or turning points during the development of Clipped Wings, and if so how did these shape the direction of the work or the paintings we see in the exhibition today?

The greatest challenge was finding a way to move beyond the Cage without abandoning the visual language that has defined my practice. I didn’t want to repeat the image of a woman trapped behind a mask, nor did I want freedom to become something too simple or triumphant.

I began asking what remains when the Cage breaks apart. Do the masks disappear, or do fragments stay with us? Can something that once confined us become part of our transformation?

The contrast between fire, birds and frames helped me explore these questions. A frame can protect and restrict; fire can liberate and destroy; a bird can symbolize freedom while remaining vulnerable. I realized that the Cage does not need to disappear completely for us to become free. Our wounds and inherited stories may remain, but our relationship with them can change. I wanted the work to hold both the remnants of confinement and the exhilaration of release, allowing destruction and renewal to exist within the same image.

Looking ahead, what ideas, themes or new directions are you interested in exploring next within your work?

I find myself increasingly interested in what happens after the Cage. What does freedom look like when escaping is no longer the central question? What do we do with the space that opens up?

I want to continue exploring new mythologies around women, particularly the woman as protector and protagonist, beyond the familiar roles of hero and victim. I am interested in strength that does not require invulnerability, and in love not as rescue, but as the willingness to remain beside someone when neither person can promise to save the other.

Visually, I want to keep exploring fragmentation, materials and the meaning of what remains: an empty frame, a broken mask, the trace of a bird that has already flown away. Sometimes an absence can carry more meaning than a complete image.

I don’t know exactly where the work will lead me, and I like that uncertainty. Perhaps the next chapter is about learning to live without the Cage and discovering, once we are finally free to fly, where we want to go. Although, I have also bought a collection of imposing Baroque frames that I cannot wait to play with. So perhaps the Cage isn’t quite finished with me yet.