My wife, Anne-Catherine Fox, who has died aged 56 of cancer, was a gifted artist who found her true vocation providing creative therapy and hope for asylum seekers and other victims of trauma. She helped heal hidden wounds through art.
Born in Gourin in Brittany, France, Anne-Catherine was the daughter of Rene Le Deunff, a doctor, and his wife, Danielle, who ran her husband’s practice. Anne-Catherine was inspired by her communist grandfather Yann Vadezour le Deunff, a French resistance and Breton freedom fighter, and her godmother, Marie-Madelaine Le Floch, whose father died while returning from a concentration camp in 1945.
Anne-Catherine drew on their courage and Breton heritage, combining her own determination and fortitude with a gentle spirit.
She studied art first in Rennes before entering the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris for a fine arts degree, specialising in printmaking. In her chosen medium, she combined imagery of the everyday with the sacred. Her works displayed a deep understanding of religious iconography, inspired particularly by the work of Rodin.
While developing her work as a professional illustrator, she also took jobs as a carer. In Paris, she volunteered for SOS Racisme and La Source, providing companionship to elderly people and to individuals dying of Aids. She then spread her empathy from Europe to Kolkata, Israel and Marrakech, working for charitable organisations that sought to heal the damaging effects of trauma and violence.
In 1990, Anne-Catherine moved to London, to work for a design company, Packaging Innovation. She and I met on a master’s course in printmaking at Camberwell College of Art. We married in Brittany in 1997 and settled in Nunhead, south-east London, where Anne-Catherine brought up our children, Emile and Marguerite, while working in Waldorf Steiner schools in Greenwich and Streatham, supporting infants with special needs. She intuitively employed visual art as a vehicle for those without a voice, often children traumatised or terrorised by war.
In 2015 she qualified as an art psychotherapist, and had worked for the last five years in primary schools, and alongside refugees, mainly at Southwark Day Centre for Asylum Seekers. As well as helping establish art therapy sessions at Barry House, a Home Office hostel for asylum seekers in East Dulwich, Anne-Catherine also ran mother and child sessions in refugee day centres and worked at La Maison Verte, a centre for pre-school children inspired by the work of the French psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto.
Increasingly exhausted yet unbowed by cancer, Anne-Catherine inspired those she worked with, bringing healing hope with her time, talents and a table of simple art materials.
She is survived by me, Emile and Marguerite.
