“As a woman, I was often bored by what life had to offer me. I preferred to draw and create my own inner landscapes.”
The impression that drawing is “like running downhill” is the driving force behind the finely wrought and sensitive yet striking work of Catherine Boyer. “There is an unfathomable richness in drawing”, she explains. “With a fine-point pencil between my fingers, I can dig into the details, and it’s in the details that we reveal ourselves. Especially as women.”

Women, and their connection to the natural world, are her subject of choice. She borrows from the shapes of nature, making them her own as she depicts women in their bodies and all that these corporal forms experience, endure and feel, down to their cellular tissues and fibres, their hair and eyelashes, and even beneath their nails and skin. The symbiotic bond between humans and the biosphere they inhabit stems from the Creole philosophy permeating all of C. Boyer’s work. “My body is an extension of nature, just as nature is an extension of my body”, she says. “Whenever I trace out a form, I am touching the body itself, in its tiniest parts, where our imagination loses its way.”

Dots are a significant recurring motif in her work, evoking the place that we occupy within the world’s vastness, at once microscopic and interstellar, powerful and vulnerable. The shapes that emerge float or unfurl through the space, ultimately flowing beyond its borders. They take on bodies that are sensual, evocative, intuitive, ineffable and ambiguous: pistils and plankton, feathers and hairs, petals and bulbs, pearls and eggs, ova and cells. A multitude of organic forms populate the artist’s sculptures and canvases, suggesting a boundless interior, a depth, an elsewhere. They are like a corporality of the sensitive, a metamorphosis of the intimate, a movement in the living world or an intrigue.

“Being a woman is an intimately painful experience”, says C. Boyer. We feel this pain in both our flesh and our stories. Intrusions, inflammations, tears, sutures, flows and fluids thus punctuate the artist’s depictions of figures, behind a certain gentleness and beauty that her gestures seem to call forth as if to more fully heal them. She includes motifs of wild flora and fauna in Les Orchidées and Les Papillons (two series begun in the early 2000s) and in the Luminescences series (2009–2010); evidence of hands interacting with matter are depicted in the Hair Tresse (2013–2020) and Divineariane (2021) series; and in Magic Wik (2022) and her mandala-inspired series Cymatique (2024–2025), she chooses increasingly hybrid, almost psychedelic forms. These meditative and somewhat restorative gestures give rise to suggestive, erotic or even chimerical figures. A quest for symbiosis seems to be at work here.

After attending art workshops offered by the Réunion-based cultural nonprofit Village Titan − the forerunner of the city of Le Port’s art school − and then earning the national advanced diploma in fine arts at the École des Beaux-Arts in Marseille, C. Boyer returned to her native island, where she worked as a secondary school teacher for nearly twenty years while continuing her artistic practice. Long ignored, her work began to attract the attention of art institutions in the first decade of the millennium. A solo exhibition, Dessus, Dessous, was devoted to her work at FRAC Réunion in 1998, followed by another at Galerie Hang’Art in Saint-Pierre titled Jouissances Océaniques in 2022–2023. In 2011, between these two milestones, she exhibited at the international Drawing Now fair in Paris and at the Joburg Art Fair in Johannesburg, represented by Galerie Binoche. She then participated in various group exhibitions, including L’Envers de l’Île at the Léon Dierx museum in Saint-Denis in Réunion in 2015, the Festival d’Arts Contemporains in the Comoros in 2016, Rêver l’Obscur at Galerie The Bridge in Paris in 2022, Mutual Core at the Artothèque in Réunion in 2021 and “Astèr Atèrla”, presented both at the Centre de Création Contemporaine Olivier Debré in Tours and at La Friche la Belle de Mai in Marseille in 2024 – an exhibition organised by curator Julie Crenn and FRAC Réunion. Some of her works belong to the collections of the Artothèque, FRAC Réunion and the Réunion region.

The quotations from the artist are from an interview the author conducted with her in 2025.