Through the recurring symbolic use of the Boabab Tree, a totem amongst trees and also images taken from her Moroccan heritage, Valérie Poupon summons an imagined place and past, imbued with images of endless streets, and feelings of far away solitude. From this fantasized landscape, come her unique designs in the search for a feeling of belonging, and a connection with a family and place unknown.

Valerie Poupon’s work is complex and heartfelt, but moreover always driven by a compulsion to reveal, through her own personal sense of conflict and contradiction, a universal sense of human truth.

Valerie’s aesthetic sense and practice however, are the result of a more cosmopolitan eye, influenced by a life living and working in Europe and the United States; the considered procedure, of drawing and then recreating her original sketch into the final piece, provides a way of  giving the work what she calls “a new grace”; controlled and deliberate with the use of only the inkpen, ensuring that there is no room for edit or error in her monochrome worlds.