Audrey Piguet - photographer
- Jan 26
- 3 min read
Audrey Piguet, between intimacy, metamorphosis, and suspended time
Before art imposed itself upon her, Audrey Piguet had turned toward mathematics or biology. She then imagined following an academic, rational, almost predictable path.
But life, sometimes, redraws its own curves. Sensitized from childhood by her grandfather, a painter and diving instructor, she already had within her this tension between observation and emotion, between measure and mystery. When photography entered her life, it was self-evident: she found there the same balance as in science, a subtle marriage between rigor and intuition.
Trained at the Vevey Professional Education Center, where she obtained her diploma in 2012 with honors, Audrey developed very early on a meticulous and pictorial approach to photography. Her work, detailed and thoughtful, mingles preparatory sketches, costume fabrication, staging, shooting, and digital retouching. Each image is constructed like a painting. The time of creation is counted in weeks, sometimes months. This slow, almost ritual process is an integral part of the work: it is its breath, its heartbeat.
Through the lens, Audrey seeks to translate inner worlds. She sometimes stages herself there, but never confuses herself with her characters: she inhabits them to better let them exist. This game of metamorphosis, born from her childhood taste for disguise, becomes an instrument of identity exploration. In each of her series, she questions the fragility of the self, gender duality, the instinctive and animal part of humanity.
Her series Funeral, begun in 2011 and still ongoing, explores the relationship between death and memory, between passage and eternity. The models, often people without posing experience, are represented there with fragile intensity. The gaze is closed, sometimes hidden, as if to preserve the soul. In Funeral Groom (2015), the hat dissolving in light becomes a symbol of fading time, of the detaching body. Audrey summons there a modern romanticism, inspired as much by Pre-Raphaelite painting as by symbolist imagery: shadow, silence, and beauty meet there.
In Parasomnia, the artist addresses a more intimate experience: sleep paralysis, a phenomenon she herself has experienced. Her images, bathed in soft light, reveal an appeased pain, a body both vulnerable and sacred. In Parasomnia 6, the wound from which plants flow instead of blood becomes a metaphor for healing: a wound transfigured by nature. Art, for Audrey, is an exorcism and a rebirth.
This introspective approach is part of a broader research on time. In Kairos, she addresses the right instant, when everything can tip over, when the present becomes eternity. Photography becomes a stop, a suspension of flow. Each image is a breath between two heartbeats of life.
But behind this gentleness hides a struggle. Audrey addresses taboos, solitude, vulnerability, the pressure of a society that demands perfection. In The Fall of Heroes, she evokes the necessity to accept the flaw, to drop the masks, to rediscover the sincerity of gesture. Because creating, for her, means laying oneself bare, slowly, painfully, but necessarily.
In her recent series, nature becomes refuge. After years in the studio, Audrey regularly escapes to explore landscapes. Water, meanders, sometimes abstract organic forms impose themselves on her like an inner mirror. Her photographs become more peaceful without ever detaching from their depth. The vegetal and the animal, recurrent in her work, become symbols of instinct and rebirth. Feathers, present in her series Liquids, pay tribute to the crow, a bird dear to her grandmother. They also appear in Your Last Birdsong, a project dedicated to another soul who shared her life, now gone. These silent tributes convey the spiritual and memorial dimension of her work.
Between Romanticism and Symbolism, Audrey composes photographic tableaux of rare intensity. She inscribes herself in the lineage of artists for whom beauty is never artifice but a state of truth. Her images, often dark, are never gloomy: they seek light at the heart of night. Resilience, gentleness, and letting go become there forms of resistance.
In this artistic maturation, Audrey fully asserts herself. She dares, she breaks free. Her photography becomes a territory of freedom where she can address all subjects, even the most intimate, the most painful. Her art is a fight against fear, but also a hymn to life. "A work lives through the eyes of those who look at it," she often says. In her mystical landscapes, in her suspended portraits, we see our own humanity reflected. Between science and dream, between control and abandon, Audrey explores the living in all its complexity. Her work, both pictorial and organic, traces a path toward appeasement, that of a woman who, through light and time, has found the freedom to be fully herself.
Dr. Marie Bagi
Director of the Musée Artistes Femmes (MAF)
Published November 4, 2025
