Reverie: What the River Carries

Based on a watercolor painted by my mother, this work returns to the Dordogne, the river that runs through so much of my family history.

At its centre is a gabare, the traditional flat-bottomed boat once used to navigate the Dordogne. I transformed my mother’s original landscape into a moving, imagined world, inhabited by figures and a small blue creature whose presence remains deliberately unexplained.

After her death, returning to her watercolor became a way of entering the image rather than simply preserving it.

Her river remains. Her boat continues its journey.

What it carries now belongs somewhere between memory, inheritance and imagination.