It all began with a book: Les villes de papier by Dominique Fortier. Through this delicate writing, I encountered an Emily Dickinson of rare sensitivity. I felt the echo of my own inspirations. It was not just the story of a recluse poet, but that of a woman transforming her solitude into a secret garden. Discovering the narrative of her confined life in Amherst, my silences found a home there, along with the vital need to make creation a refuge for the spirit.
This hermitage, far from being a weakness, was a powerful affirmation of her artistic independence. By choosing her own perimeter, Dickinson protected the purity of her voice. It is in this same place that Une galerie à soi finds its purpose: creating an autonomous space where creation follows its own trajectory. To choose one’s place is to choose one’s freedom.
What touches me most deeply is how her work is embodied in its medium: she fixed her visions on scraps of envelopes destined to vanish, which she then hand-assembled into small booklets. This "small labor" of a poet, where the stitch becomes a metaphor for the infinitely small and the fading of the self, resonates with my own gestures. Binding, sewing, assembling: it is a way of fixing poetry within matter.
While Dickinson magnified the ordinary, she was not unaware of the precariousness of existence. While my future project Sans ailes (Wingless) evokes a forced seclusion—a condition that hinders us despite ourselves—it is undoubtedly my work "Flottement, une vaine offrande" (Floating, a Vain Offering) that serves as a beautiful example of a dialogue with her poems. It embodies that suspended gesture, an offering seeking its place in the invisible, between giving and absence.
To create is perhaps simply that: transforming a restricted space, a sanctuary of silence for the mind, out of almost nothing—out of emptiness and silence.