From Gesture to Repair. Conversations with Sarah Jérôme.

From Gesture
to Repair
.
Conversations with Sarah Jérôme.

Sarah Jérôme / © Fanny Giniès, 2025

A sunny morning led me to Montreuil, in the Paris region. The studio, bathed in light, opened into a calm and generous brightness , at once simple and spacious. The space seemed to breathe with the artworks, as if it naturally extended their presence. Sarah offered me a coffee. In that simple, almost everyday gesture, something of the rhythm of her life was already taking shape: an attentiveness to reality, to the moment, to relation. It was there, in this atmosphere both precise and welcoming, that our exchange began – a conversation that now finds its place in writing.

I discovered the work of Sarah Jérôme through her gallerist, Héliante Bourdeaux-Maurin. During a conversation, she showed me a catalogue of Sarah’s work, almost without comment, as one would offer an object still in the process of taking shape. What immediately struck me was the silent density of the images: something at once restrained and traversed, where the body appears less as a motif than as a field of forces, tensions, and metamorphoses.

This first encounter was not an immediate reading, but rather a lingering visual disturbance. In these works there was a circulation between disciplines – dance, painting, sculpture, performance – that do not simply sit side by side but seem to emerge from the same core: that of a practice in which the body is never merely represented, but constantly engaged, displaced, transformed.

It is from this discreet but insistent entry into her world that this conversation took shape. It allows us to return to a trajectory where ruptures and continuities intertwine, where biographical constraints and artistic choices respond to one another, and where the question of survival – material, physical, mental – runs deeply through the making of the works.

Through this interview, the aim is less to trace a linear path than to understand how a practice is built in the friction between gesture, everyday life, and the inner necessity to create.

Sarah Jérôme / © Fanny Giniès, 2025

Julia Palmeirao: As I always do, I like to begin my interviews with a seemingly simple, almost inevitable question, one that often reveals a great deal about an artist’s trajectory. Looking back to the beginning of your path, at what moment did you understand that creation would not be just one practice among others, but a deep necessity, a way of being in the world? When did you first tell yourself that you would become an artist?

Sarah Jérôme: I have always known I would be an artist. Very early on, I felt that I was not really suited to the traditional school system. It’s not that I was a bad student, but I already understood that this environment did not fit me. I preferred having my hands in the soil at the back of my garden.

I have always been very sensory, very connected to my body. I needed to be in matter, in movement. As a child, I did a lot of dance, but also painting, drawing, modelling clay, and even cooking. I needed to use my hands, my body, to create in a concrete way. Sitting on a chair writing or thinking for hours did not suit me. I needed to be in action, to make my body a real tool.

Dance quickly took an essential place in my life. I was fascinated by the stage, by performance, by the possibility of embodying characters. I started dancing at the age of seven, then competing from the age of twelve. At thirteen, I represented France in Japan, and at fourteen I left Brittany, where my parents lived, to join a dance school in Paris.

Later, I was admitted to the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris, and then continued my training at the Lyon Opera. At that time, I devoted at least eight hours a day to dance. My entire life was organised around this discipline, to the point that I set aside the visual arts due to lack of time. My body was then my primary instrument of expression.

Sarah Jérôme / archive danse, 1997

For personal reasons, I had to stop dancing at the age of twenty-one. What I missed most was artistic expression and the stage. I therefore turned to theatre, while also reconnecting with the visual arts. I resumed painting and drawing classes, joined a preparatory program, and then entered the Beaux-Arts.

However, I was not very happy there. I was used to an extremely rigorous and professional framework, whereas at the Beaux-Arts I felt I was in a much more casual, almost disordered environment. It made me anxious. Moreover, when I arrived at the school, painting was still considered “dead.” It was the era of the rise of new media, and its place was only granted within a minimalist and conceptual approach. To do figurative painting was almost shameful.

I then pursued theatre more intensely, drawn to collective work, rehearsals, troupe life, and the stage. Eventually, I returned to the visual arts in an almost self-taught way when my son was born in 2007. I worked alone, without a studio, setting myself up wherever I could in order to create.

At that time, the father of my children, himself an artist, regularly hosted art critics, curators, and other professionals from the field at our home. I would sometimes hang a few works on the walls, and visitors would often ask who the artist was. That is how, very naturally, I had my first exhibitions. In a way, people came to me.

Fugue 20, 87 x 117 cm, 2020, BD

J.P.: After this period of training and exploration, how did the visual arts gradually come to take a central place in your life? At what point did you feel that this practice was no longer just an intimate work, but a true artistic commitment?

S.J. : Little by little, I started producing again, even though I was a young mother. At that time, I began teaching in order to earn some money. And teaching, seeing students work, search, experiment, really reignited my desire to create.

At the time, I was mainly an actress. I did a bit of theatre, a bit of television, a bit of film. But it all ultimately belonged to the same language. Whether in theatre or in the visual arts, it is always about stepping into the skin of a character, embodying something, interpreting. I was in this idea of interpretation.

Then, gradually, I started working more and more, exhibiting more frequently. But it took time. It took me several years before I felt legitimate, before I had the sense that my work was truly solid.

The first person to give me a chance was Sylvie Corroller, then director of the Fondation espace écureuil in Toulouse, who in 2015 invited me to take part in a solo exhibition at the Bibliothèque patrimoniale du Grand Cahors. That was the moment when things began to shift to another scale.

Progressively, this took up more and more space in my life. I gradually set theatre aside, and it was really the visual arts that came to the forefront – mainly painting and sculpture, with a particular preference for clay.

Field of Thoughts, installation, 2021

J.P.: Dance, which has played an essential role in your journey, does it still inhabit your work today?

S.J.: Yes, dance has never completely left me. It is always present in the physicality of my work, in the way I engage my body in the creative process. I notably created a series of paintings and sculptures inspired by several pieces by Pina Bausch. In those bodies of work, the reference to dance was more explicit, more directly represented.

But more generally, dance is rather underlying. It is in the background, in the relationship to movement, to space, to bodily presence. It runs through my work in a less visible way, but it is always there.

J.P.: Does this performative dimension also extend into your artistic collaborations?

S.J.: Yes, absolutely. I notably collaborated with Emmanuelle Destremau, who is a playwright, singer-songwriter, and performer – she wears many hats. Together we created a hybrid form of performance, between theatre, performance, and visual arts. During the performance, I paint and model clay, and there is a real interaction between us.

The piece lasts about one hour and fifteen minutes. We created it at the National Stage of Colmar and have performed it several times on different stages. It is a way of bringing together, in a single space, all the practices that have shaped my trajectory.

Montagnes / Sarah Jérôme and Ruppert Pupkin

J.P.: Your trajectory is particularly rich: dance, theatre, cinema, performance, painting, sculpture… How do all these practices coexist today in your work?

S.J.: Yes, it’s true that my path is very rich, but at the same time I feel it’s always a bit the same thing. It’s as if I’m always talking about the same subject, but in different languages. It is always the body that expresses itself. It is always, in one way or another, about the experience of the working body, the body in space, the body in relation to landscape, to the other, to tensions, shocks, encounters between different personalities.

In the end, it is always the same story, just told from different angles. So it is not so strange that all these practices coexist. I still feel like the same person, moving between several “body-tools,” while ultimately exploring the same questions.

J.P.: If you had to introduce yourself to someone who knows nothing about your path, how would you define yourself?

S.J.: I would simply say that I am an artist who uses the body to tell stories.

J.P.: The notion of storytelling seems very important in your work.

S.J.: Yes, there is very much this idea of telling stories. Theatre has nourished me enormously in that regard. But they are not necessarily illustrative or didactic narratives. They are more fragments of stories, flashes, images that suggest narration without ever explicitly stating it. I like to provoke visual shocks, to bring forth strong images that generate sensations and open up a space for interpretation.

J.P.: In your work, there is a very strong contrast between sculpture, often rooted in a grounded, almost organic materiality, and painting, which today seems traversed by an explosion of intense, luminous colours. How do you explain this evolution? What does the emergence of this much more vibrant palette mean to you?

S.J.: My painting has not always been like this. At the beginning, it was much earthier, darker, sometimes even quite anxiety-ridden.

J.P.: What caused that shift?

S.J.: A few years ago, I went through a period where I was constrained, where I didn’t really have the possibility to take my place. I think there were many things that needed to come out in a visceral way. I was working a lot on interiority, on this idea of the body-landscape, of mutation, of transformation. There was also a very strong pain to express.

At that time, this pain was expressed in a more literal, more direct way, almost at face value. I needed to narrate suffering, as a way of speaking between the lines, of saying things without explicitly formulating them.

Then an event occurred that made this story explode, as if something was finally breaking out of its shell. As if, suddenly, I could finally breathe. This shift was quite brutal. There was a very strong shock, and I felt as though a fault line had opened, allowing light to seep in.

Light then naturally soothed the darkness. There is still a part of shadow in my work. There remains strangeness, unease. But there is much less anger than before.

J.P.: Can you tell us a bit about the materials you use, especially tracing paper? How does this support influence your way of painting and your relationship to the image?

S.J.: Yes. Tracing paper is, for me, a very particular material. It invites sliding, touching. Its contact is sensual and fluid. It allows me to seek light through the absorption of matter. I always begin with a form of abstraction, like a physical and dynamic expression of painting. I focus on movement, colour, density, and the musicality of traces.

Then I dig into it, remove material. It is almost an archaeological approach: I erase until I reach the image within the matter itself, as if I were bringing it out from inside.

By erasing areas of the work, kinds of ghosts appear that become characters and build the narrative of the image. These characters are revealed through absence. I could not achieve the same result on canvas or paper that absorbs too quickly. The colour sets immediately and makes the process irreversible. With tracing paper, I can make mistakes, change my mind, repent, erase as much as I want. It is a wonderful playground where no risk is dangerous. It is very reassuring. Tracing paper also offers me a very particular, extra-sensitive light. And there is something sculptural in this practice, which I also find in clay, when I wax it once fired: it takes on a slightly nacreous texture, like a dermis, a skin seen under a microscope or the surface of marble. I like this translucent, organic, sensual quality.

J.P.: In your way of painting, it feels as if gesture, material, and even the artist’s body are at the heart of the process. Concretely, how do you construct an image? What tools and stages do you go through in your pictorial work?

S.J.: I fix my tracing paper onto large wooden panels painted white, which I manipulate throughout the making of the painting, alternating between floor and wall. Depending on the inclination, I can decide whether I want it to flow, or whether I want the material to spread in pools.

I don’t only use brushes. I also use rags, steel wool, cotton buds, sometimes even my hands or nails. It is important for me to create a repertoire of forms and traces that is varied enough to compose my images. The painting is built in layers.

At each stage, I remove and add. And each time, I keep small fragments of each layer of the “mille-feuille,” like remnants. It is, in fact, a repertoire of gestures.

I move from the general to the detail. At first, there are very large gestures, very broad, very loose, almost chaotic. Then, gradually, I refine certain areas. I move toward detail step by step, until something almost microscopic. But at the same time, I make sure not to go too far into precision. As soon as something becomes too realistic, I tend to erase or distort it. I am wary of truth and technical virtuosity.

There was a period when I really wanted to represent reality in a faithful, almost didactic way, perhaps to prove to myself that I was capable, through technique, of reproducing an image photographically. Like managing to perform a very difficult, acrobatic figure with one’s body as a dancer. Today, I aspire to something else; I feel less need to prove virtuosity. As soon as an image looks too close to reality, I prefer to alter it. I like playing with body proportions, slightly deforming them, tipping them out of balance as if the body were affected by external elements, wind, sun, an invisible force, that disrupt its reading.

Sarah Jérôme, Atelier 2022 / Fanny Giniès

J.P.: And how do you choose your subjects? Do you go through sketches, preparatory drawings, or is your method more intuitive?

S.J.: I often collect images, from the internet, books, or my own personal photographs. I build image catalogues made up of body postures, landscapes, light, things I like and that catch my eye. Then I place them around me and I make a kind of mental synthesis of all of it. Sometimes there is the entire body, sometimes only fragments. What interests me above all are positions, gestures, emotions, bodily attitudes. It is a bit like making lists of words: I make lists of bodies in this or that position, in this or that light. And from there, I reinvent the surrounding space.

Sometimes I also change the character, or the relationship between characters. In fact, it is like a collage that starts from an existing image, but which I completely mutate. I interpret it a bit like an actor or dancer would interpret choreography. Often, you don’t really recognize the person. It is somewhat transformed, sometimes almost dissolved. It is not so much the personality of the model that interests me, but rather their emotion, their state, something more diffuse. I don’t really make portraits; it is the language of the body that interests me.

In whitewater (Les Glaneurs), 456x200cm, 2024

J.P.: If we return to your sculptural work, how would you describe your relationship to this practice compared to painting? What does sculpture engage differently, in gesture, in the body, and in the creative process?

S.J.: Sculpture is physical work. Also exhausting. Some people approach sculpture very gently, but for me it is more like a fight, like a boxing match.

Modelling is first and foremost a kind of body-to-body sensation, often linked to the need to move and to repair. You can almost work with your eyes closed when handling clay. It is visceral, even if there is always some form of representation in my work. For me, sculpture is about understanding how matter reacts to gravity, to firing, to atmosphere.

There are many constraints in sculpture, especially ceramics. Even though, like in my painting, I can remove material, especially with clay, there is always stress at the drying stage and during firing. It can explode, it can break. And I try to work with that. How to repair accidents, wounds. I often fill in the scars with wax, sometimes with plaster or paint, but in a much more discreet and organic way than in my paintings. There is almost a kind of care that appears at the end of a form of struggle, a mixture of combat and repair, which does not quite materialize in the same way on the surface of tracing paper.

J.P.: Beyond the artistic gesture, what does sculpture imply for you on a more concrete, almost logistical and physical level? Does this also change your relationship to the practice?

S.J.: Sculpture is also very constraining from a purely practical point of view. For example, I’ve recently moved and haven’t yet been able to reconnect my kiln. So there is an entire logistics around it. It’s quite complicated. It is also heavy, physically. I often make large pieces, so they are very heavy, and at the same time fragile. It is a permanent paradox: it is both massive and extremely vulnerable.

And then it can be exhausting for the body. There is the weight, the movements, the handling… sometimes it gives me back pain. So yes, it is a practice that is also very physically demanding, beyond the artistic aspect itself.

J.P.: What have been the major influences in your artistic journey? Are there artists, choreographers, or even thinkers who have particularly nourished your work?

S.J.: There have been many choreographers, first and foremost. Pina Bausch, Dimitris Papaioannou, Sasha Waltz, the company Peeping Tom… These are artists who deeply inspire me in the way they speak about the body. In their work, the body is at once tool, material, and vehicle. It is not just an autonomous entity or a body executing beautiful movements. What interests me is the interaction between bodies, their transformation, their capacity to mutate. I like when the body becomes almost monstrous, when it deforms, when you do not immediately understand what is happening. So there is a very strong influence of dance in my work.

In painting, I am very impressed by what I would call painters of the “virtuosity of awkwardness,” such as Marlene Dumas or Miriam Cahn. They are artists of incredible power. Among contemporary painters more closely linked to representation, I also greatly admire Michaël Borremans, especially for the quality of his staging. I like artists who construct strange worlds, who create a singular atmosphere.

In sculpture, I long admired Berlinde De Bruyckere as well as Louise Bourgeois. But I am a bit more distant from them today, because their universe corresponds more to a period when I myself was more focused on the exacerbation of suffering and pain. Today, I feel more inclined to speak about repair, about appeasement. In that sense, Giuseppe Penone is an artist I greatly admire. His works are always sensitive, humble, and deeply precise. We are surrounded by such a noisy world, so full of chaos and shouting, that in my recent painting series I feel more drawn to something softer, calmer, more luminous.

J.P.: We also sense in your work a recent shift: as if violence, pain, or confinement are gradually giving way to something more peaceful, almost reparative. Is this evolution also nourished by literature or certain narrative references?

S.J.: Yes, completely. I was thinking of a series I made called Sanctum. There was this idea of sanctuary, of seeking peace rather than continuing to dig where it hurts. I feel there is already so much pain around us that we do not necessarily need to add more of it in images.

And in literature, there is a book that marked me deeply and that I relied on for my last exhibition in Lyon: The Wall (Le Mur invisible) by The Wall. It is a book she wrote at the end of her life, in the early 1960s. The story is about a woman who finds herself in a chalet in the Austrian Alps with a couple of friends. One evening, they leave for a short trip and never return. She remains alone with their dog. She gradually discovers strange things: dead birds in the forest, unsettling behaviour… until she realises she is trapped within an immense area enclosed by an invisible wall. On the other side, she sees in the distance motionless beings, as if dead or asleep, in a post-apocalyptic atmosphere. It is an extremely powerful novel that speaks both about confinement, emancipation, and self-sufficiency. I also find it fascinating from a social and political point of view.

J.P.: Do you, in a way, recognise yourself in this story? Or do you see it as a metaphor of the contemporary world?

S.J.: Yes, I think so. But this book came to me at a very specific moment: I was doing a residency at the Abbaye Royale de Fontevraud, which was long a prison. I was meant to work on the theme of confinement. I chose instead to reverse it and shift this notion toward emancipation, toward the possibility of finding light, an escape.

The performance I mentioned earlier, Montagnes, also speaks about this: the mountains we carry within us, and how we try to free ourselves from blockage and confinement. How we get back up when we fall. How we gather the pieces.

And to answer your question: yes, I think it is an allegory of the present world, but not only the art world, the world in general. Today, we can very easily be overwhelmed by fear, by constant noise, by the spectacular. I have the impression that we are constantly trying to shock our perception, to divert our attention from what is essential. In my artistic practice, I try on the contrary to slow things down, to remove noise, to suspend time a little, to calm things, to create another temporality.

Interior day (touching), series room with a view, 152x120cm, 2023

J.P.: Do you have a working ritual? How are your days concretely organised, and what does your creative rhythm look like over the course of a week?

S.J.: I’ll be very pragmatic: I have two children. So I get up with them. First and foremost, I am a mother, with a fairly concrete family organisation, since their father now lives in another city. I wake up at 7 a.m. to spend time with them before they go to school. Then I do 15 minutes of yoga and I head to the studio.

In reality, even if it’s not an office life, it is a very structured life. It is far from the romantic image of the artist living on air and light, waiting for inspiration to strike. There is a lot of discipline in my work. When I arrive at the studio, I cut my formats, prepare my supports, look at the images that will feed the series I’m working on. Often I also respond to specific themes or invitations. I like this constraint-based exercise because it forces you to step sideways. It opens other doors, explores spaces I might not have gone to spontaneously. It’s easy to repeat oneself, to fall back into habits. Having an imposed subject helps precisely to escape that.

So I spend a lot of time looking at images, but also observing my own work. I look at what I have already done in order to understand how to go elsewhere. I often compare this process to cooking. When you make bread, you take a piece of dough from the previous day to prepare the starter for the next. I work a lot like that. There is always a bit of the previous painting in the next one, something that continues, that is stitched, woven over time. And then the work gradually shifts, depending on the life around me, the themes I’m given, the people I meet, current events as well, and the counterpoint I want to bring. Because in the end, I am always trying to find a way not to be overwhelmed by the darkness of the world.

J.P.: In recent years, your activity has been particularly intense, with many exhibitions and projects. How do you experience this sustained pace? Is it a source of stimulation or sometimes a form of pressure?

S.J.: It is always very stimulating to have exhibitions, deadlines, goals. Having a date in mind is very motivating. Of course, it can also create pressure, especially when, in one’s personal life, things are more complicated. When you have children, when you move, when you renovate, when you don’t have a studio for a while, it can become very difficult to find time to work. In those moments, deadlines can be demanding, because there is no real choice: you have to move forward.

But at the same time, it remains very stimulating. The real difficulty is managing fatigue. Dance taught me a lot in that regard. It gave me a certain ability to push my limits and endure effort. Perhaps even too much at times, because I tend to go all the way. And often, it is the body that eventually says stop, that gives out. But so far, this intensity has always been a driving force. And in the current state of the art world, having too many things to do is ultimately much less anxiety-inducing than having no prospects at all.

Where Your Echo Still Remains II, oil painting on tracing paper, 152 x 120 cm, 2022

J.P.: What has been, up to now, your greatest challenge as an artist?

S.J.: It’s a difficult question, because it depends on what we are talking about. For example, my residency at the Abbaye Royale de Fontevraud was very demanding, because it took place during a particularly complicated period in my life, logistically and organisationally. But if I have to answer more deeply, I would say that my greatest challenge is being a mother. The father of my children gradually disengaged from his fatherhood, and I am now raising my children alone. I thought that after our separation things would become simpler, but in reality it made the organisation even more complex. As time goes on, the children grow up, of course, but I think the biggest challenge for a woman artist is precisely to manage to be both an artist and a mother.

And this question is not resolved at all. You have to find the energy to carry everything at once. It is a profoundly unfair situation: you are expected to be a good mother, a good artist, to support yourself, to handle everyday life. The greatest difficulty is not so much producing artworks, however complex or physical they may be. What is hardest is finding the mental, physical, and temporal space to do everything at once.

Making a monumental sculpture can be less complicated than wondering what you are going to cook for dinner, or whether everything is ready in the school bags for the next day. That is where the real exhaustion and the greatest mental load lie. For a long time, I did not talk about my children. I felt it was a “women’s topic,” something better left unsaid. Today, I realise that there are extremely many of us living in this situation. There is a form of precarity that is not only financial, but a precarity of life. You often feel you have to do ten times more than men in order to exist.

To manage to fulfil oneself simultaneously on all levels – artistic, familial, personal, economic – is almost impossible. And yes, I think that is my greatest challenge.

J.P.: As a mother, I fully understand that this can represent your greatest challenge. To avoid burning out, it is often essential to be surrounded, to rely on present and committed people. In an artist’s trajectory, it is also crucial to lean on those who support and defend the work over the long term. Can you tell us about your relationship with your gallerist and the galleries you work with today?

S.J.: I work with Fanny Giniès, who comes to the studio once a week to discuss my upcoming exhibitions with me, help me write curatorial notes, handle my communication, and take care of certain administrative aspects. Being a photographer herself, her perspective on my artistic production is invaluable, and her presence brings a lot of rigour and structure to my work. She takes care of many aspects for which my own skills are limited.

And then, of course, there are my galleries and their gallerists. Feeling that they truly defend my work gives me strength. It is precious support, both human and professional.

I work in particular with Héliante Bourdeaux-Maurin, director of H Gallery. She came to me after I took part, through curator Amélie Adamo, in a group exhibition in her space. It took us some time before we began working together officially. But when you have someone who genuinely believes in your work, it changes everything. A gallery brings visibility, opens doors, and provides access to networks and opportunities that would otherwise not necessarily be available.

I also work with the Aucube Gallery in Mâcon, represented by David Biard, and the Milan-based Prometeo Gallery, whose co-directors are Ida Pisani and Davide Macchiarini. Having this support, and being accompanied by galleries based in different countries, strengthens me a lot. It gives me confidence and encourages me to continue my work with even more energy and serenity.

J.P.: Thank you.

https://www.sarahjerome.com/

https://h-gallery.fr/

https://www.prometeogallery.com/

https://www.aucube.fr/

Touching II, mine graphite sur papier calque, mixed media on tracing paper, 195x152cm, 2020