Clipped Wings

Clipped Wings

Sandra Chevrier

15 October - 15 November 2026

Clipped Wings explores the tension between freedom and restraint, vulnerability and survival, desire and the forces that keep us grounded

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The opening reception will take place Thursday 15th October, 6pm onwards 

There is a particular kind of violence in being taught how far you are allowed to fly.

Clipped Wings explores the tension between freedom and restraint, vulnerability and survival, desire and the forces that keep us grounded. Through fragmented bodies, intimate embraces, wounded faces, and birds caught between flight and captivity, the works inhabit a space where tenderness and violence coexist.

The bird has long been a symbol of freedom. Yet a bird does not need to be behind bars to be imprisoned. Sometimes the cage is invisible. Sometimes the wings are still there, but something has taught us not to use them.

In these paintings, figures seem caught in moments of suspension; holding one another, protecting one another, consuming one another. Love can become refuge, but it can also become a place where we disappear. The body can be both a sanctuary and a battlefield. What appears to be an act of protection may conceal fear; what looks like surrender may contain resistance.

At the same time, these works turn toward the strength that can emerge between women. Vulnerability is not presented as weakness, but as a space from which solidarity, empathy, and resistance can grow. One woman reaches toward another in a moment of defeat, offering support where there was once isolation. In another, a woman stands at the threshold of becoming the successor to a fallen superhero, a reversal of the traditional mythology in which strength, protection, and heroism have so often been embodied by men. She does not wait to be rescued. She rises to carry the story forward.

These moments speak to a form of female empowerment that is not about becoming invulnerable. It is about recognizing our own strength, and sometimes finding that strength through one another. Vulnerability becomes a space for connection rather than isolation, where one woman can hold another through moments of uncertainty, grief, or defeat. The act of reaching toward another woman becomes an act of resistance, a reminder that strength does not always mean standing alone.

As in my previous work, I juxtapose deeply human figures with fragments drawn from the world of comic books. These fictional characters become almost ghostlike presence, they are projections of emotions, memories, and fantasies that inhabit our relationships. They evoke the stories and mythologies that surrounded us as we grew up, shaping our ideas of love, femininity, masculinity, power, and heroism.

 By removing these characters from their original narratives and weaving them into intimate and often fragile human moments, I question the roles they were originally given. The familiar becomes displaced, fragmented, and reimagined. The hero can fall. The woman can become the protector. The supporting character can become the protagonist. The mythology can be rewritten.

The ornate frame itself becomes another kind of cage. Historically associated with portraiture, beauty, status, and the preservation of an idealized image, it can both celebrate and confine. By placing fragmented contemporary figures within these traditional structures, I explore the tension between being seen and being defined, between being admired and being possessed by the gaze of others. The women are framed, but they are also confronting the viewer.

The fragmentation of the female body also speaks to the ways women have historically been reduced to individual parts: to the eyes, the lips, the face, the body, as objects of desire, admiration, or judgment. By isolating these fragments, I seek not to further objectify the female figure, but to reclaim these parts as sites of identity and agency. An eye becomes a gaze. A mouth becomes a voice. A fragment becomes something that cannot be entirely possessed or defined by the viewer.

In this sense, the works question not only the cages we inhabit, but also the images that have taught us what we are supposed to be. The stories we inherit can become invisible structures: ideas about femininity, beauty, love, strength, and heroism that shape us long before we are conscious of them. To break free may therefore mean more than escaping a physical or emotional confinement. It may mean reclaiming the right to define ourselves.

Ultimately, these works are less about idealized love than about what lies beneath it: the need to be seen, touched, chosen, and protected, alongside the awareness that every form of attachment carries the possibility of pain. They ask what happens when the structures that have confined us, whether emotional, cultural, societal, or internal, begin to fracture.

The birds in Clipped Wings exist somewhere between captivity and escape. Some are enclosed. Others are already in motion, their wings ignited as if freedom itself carries the possibility of destruction. They suggest that liberation is not always a clean or triumphant act. Sometimes leaving the cage means confronting everything that kept us inside it. Sometimes freedom means discovering that the wings we thought were broken are still capable of carrying us.

Between tenderness and violence, reality and fiction, vulnerability and strength, these works inhabit that fragile place where love can become both our greatest refuge and our greatest vulnerability.

Ultimately, Clipped Wings is not about the absence of freedom, but about the struggle to reclaim it.

It asks what remains of us when our wings have been damaged and whether they can still carry us somewhere new.