Living stories
On Motherhood and Making with Tiffany Bouelle
French artist Tiffany Bouelle on creativity, motherhood, and the unexpected ways one transforms the other.
For Tiffany Bouelle, creativity is not something she sets time aside to practise. Instead, it simmers, waits and, when it is ready, surfaces in her art and in the way she moves through her day-to-day life.
"I approach life as a playground where boundaries remain fluid," she says. "It feels like something waiting to emerge."
Her practice spans painting and commercial work, two modes she keeps deliberately distinct. Her paintings address the viewer directly, rooted in real and tangible subjects. Her commercial projects offer something else: a shift in atmosphere, a world built to transport. "Perhaps, in this way, I seek to offer fragments of reverie," she reflects. "A gentle reprieve from the more serious themes I explore in my gallery work."
The visual instincts behind that work trace back to childhood. Tiffany has long been drawn to cinema, not the mainstream, but the strange and the handmade. Jan Švankmajer. Early Tim Burton. The stop-motion music videos of Michel Gondry. Alexander Calder's playful circus films. Works that revealed their subjects in an unexpected light and expanded what felt possible across mediums.
"This visual richness has always inspired me to bring depth to a subject," she says. Scenography, lighting, styling, all became natural extensions of how she sees and expresses herself in the world.
It is motherhood, though, that has most profoundly reshaped how she works and who she is.
"It brought about an unexpected metamorphosis," Tiffany says, "granting me what feels like ten years of artistic maturity. A remarkable and unforeseen acceleration." She describes the experience in complex chapters, like a poem by Baudelaire, full of questioning and contradiction. Exhausted and euphoric, often at once.
Her son's way of moving through the world, the way he pays attention and takes joy in discovering everything around him, has found its way into her practice. Not as subject matter, but as a way of seeing.
"I must admit," she says, "I truly love being a mother."
When asked what she would make for him, not a gift, but a feeling, she doesn't hesitate.
"A life-sized house filled with everything that makes him laugh, so that I could hear his laughter all day long. That sound is a melody that fills me with boundless energy."
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