The Journey of a Belgian Artist Rebuilding Herself Through Art Therapy

Sabine: Before the attack, I made jewelry. My father taught me, and already around the age of six I would sit at the workbench next to him. At 15, I began my apprenticeship, and at 19 I became self-employed.
Before the attack, I was working part-time in a very well-known jewelry store and was about to sign a full-time contract. After the attack, I couldn’t do it anymore. I no longer had enough strength or dexterity in my hands, and I developed a deep fear of the torch. I had to grieve what I loved.
Before, I also attended sculpture classes, but that too became impossible. The physically closed posture required for those practices was no longer bearable for me.

I then moved into public art and monumental painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, and there I found my place. To paint large, you need to open your arms, step back, keep your head upright. Movement allows me to do that. In jewelry, you are bent over, closed in. In painting, you stand, you move, your arms rise… like a butterfly.
I now try to integrate three-dimensional elements into my paintings, adding material and texture. But I constantly have to adapt, because I can no longer work for long periods.

Sabine: Yes. After the attack, physically I couldn’t do it anymore, but mentally I was blocked as well.
I had no desire, no ideas. Nothing appealed to me in any medium. It was as if a part of me had died. And yet, art had always been part of my life. But I no longer knew what to do with it.

Sabine: A total loss of desire. No interest in anything.
A form of lethargy. No desire to move, no desire to speak. Just emptiness, to stop thinking.

Sabine: I learned to let go.
Not to try to make something, but just to do it. Without thinking, without trying to find meaning in what I was doing. Not trying to resemble anyone. Just letting things emerge.
No one else expected a result, and I had to learn not to expect anything either. That was the hardest part.

Sabine: You have to accept letting go of who you have always been.
For me, it was a grieving process. I went through denial, anger, and then acceptance. Today, I accept that I will never be able to do things as I did before.
But it’s not an end. It’s a new beginning.

Sabine: I lost fluidity. Before, I acted without thinking.
After, every movement required thought. I was afraid of fire. And my hands no longer functioned as they used to.
I had to learn to do things differently, with more softness and slowness.

Sabine: You have to learn to welcome your emotions without trying to create something familiar. If there is resistance, you need to return to what is known first, and then gradually move elsewhere. Without ever forcing.

Sabine: I had to relearn my body, adapt my movements to what I could no longer do.
I continue to paint and sculpt. Each piece is a step in my reconstruction.
In 2024, a psychologist who had worked on trauma, using my testimony, opened a center for newly arrived migrants and invited me to contribute as a volunteer and facilitate group creative sessions based on what I learned. The patients often came by obligation. While she saw one patient, I worked with the others through art.
I offered them paper, pencils, markers, plasticine. They had to learn to let go. Many drew war, escape, loss. Some cried, others expressed anger or relief through colors.
I told them it wasn’t a competition or a performance, but a space to express what they carried inside.
For me as well, it was a deeply meaningful human experience. I had to stop after a situation triggered a primal fear. I relived something of the attack. I wasn’t ready. I had not yet trained in art therapy, and I was advised to wait.
I was one of the most physically and mentally affected after the terrorist attack. I had a concussion and a memory gap of about six months—three months before and three months after.
I was told that the memories of the attack would probably never return.
The path is still long. But art has allowed me to express what was buried, what I could no longer carry.
I am no longer trying to become who I was before.
I continue, differently.

Sabine: Today, Sabine Borgignons defines herself as an artist in continuous transformation, whose practice is inseparable from her process of reconstruction.
A former jeweler, she has shifted her language toward gestural and monumental painting, where the body plays a central role. Sometimes working ambidextrously, she adapts her gestures to the physical limitations left by trauma, transforming constraint into an expressive resource.
Her work no longer seeks technical mastery or performance, but unfolds as a sensitive and embodied exploration. Each artwork becomes a space of deposition, where traces of lived experience can emerge—pain, fear, but also relief and reopening.
For her, creating is no longer about returning to what once was—but about making visible, gesture after gesture, what continues to rebuild itself.
Sabine’s exhibitions in Brussels have drawn attention to art’s therapeutic role for trauma survivors. 

Through her work and public testimony, she contributes to collective memory of the Brussels attacks, transforming personal tragedy into creative testimony of human resilience.