LE PLONGEON (THE DIVE)
Gouache on paper and acrylic
on wood
210x297mm
2025
To reach the bottom of your emotional pool.
Long before I turned to visual art, I found my voice through poetry. As an eternal optimist
I have often found it challenging to articulate the deeper and more difficult emotions that shape my inner world and writing poetry has always been a way for me to externalise them.
Since immersing myself into painting and illustrating last year, I have primarily worked with visual imagery, leaving my poetry behind, unsure of how to bring these two part of myself together. This artwork marks my first attempt to unite them.
For this piece, I chose to use French as a way of reconnecting with my roots. As a Swiss
artist living in Cardiff, questions of identity and belonging have been central to my creative
journey over the past six years. I once worked hard to soften my French accent and blend
in, but gradually I realised that my “Swiss-ness” is not something to erase, it is something
to embrace. Beginning this series in my mother tongue is my way of affirming that identity
and allowing it to shape and inform my work moving forward.
Le Plongeon (The Dive) explores both the acknowledgment of feeling deeply and the expe-
rience of emotional absence. In French, the expression «toucher le fond» literally means
hitting rock bottom, having little left to give. Through a subtle play on words, however, it
can also be read as “reaching the bottom of something,” suggesting a journey into the
depths of emotion and an embrace of profound feeling.
