A nomadic stone carver - From pebbles to jewels
“You don't find the stone. The stone finds you”
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I’ve been randomly roaming for some years now, and as far as I can remember, I always loved stones. The road is paved with untold beauties, only waiting to be revealed. One day on that same road, at the far end of the world, I met a jade carver who became my big-hearted teacher.
Back in France, I tried to keep on carving stones, with what was at hand, as always. I did my first jewels with fairly limited means and stones from the roadside. I like their complexity, their abundance, their subtlety, their delicateness.
As I am neither a geologist nor a mineralogist, I cannot name each and every single stone I work. Each jewel is therefore the result of an experiment, according to the inspiration of the moment and how much leeway the stone gave me to make one last transformation.
Tethys - mother of all stones
In greek mythology, Tethys is an archaic sea goddess, daughter of Ouranos (the sky) and Gaia (the earth). Being the wife of her brother the Titan-god Oceanus, she is the mother of the rivers and a symbol of fertility.
Thetys is also a prehistoric ocean which separated the super-continent of Pangaea into two sub-continents, Gondwana and Laurasia, about 200 million years ago. The western part of this ocean stood where is now Europe. Most of the stones that made it to us are born around that age or later.
A handicraft production
“I don't sell stones. I sell work and passion.”
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It is easy today to find carved and polished gemstones at a ridiculously low price. The business of stones' therapeutic benefits is huge. Markets are actually saturated of those cheap chackras enhancers. Beyond the soundness of these beliefs, which belong to each and everyone's own spirituality, the production conditions of those stones - from their extraction till the finished product - are never evoked by the merchants.
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Open air mines are created at the expense of forests. Even though some mining prospectors plant back what they have destroyed, the impact on the grounds is far from being insignificant. Some countries have seen their gemstones resources literally plundered. Most of the stones are taken to specialized structures in India, Mexico, Brazil, Malaysia..., where they are industrially carved, polished and sometimes even crimped by low paid workers. Then they are traded in "stones supermarkets" and sold back to industrialized countries retailers. Hard to be competitive in those conditions !
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All my jewels are made of stones I collect throughout my travels and that randomly happen to be on my path. They are carved and polished with small machines and can take up to fifteen hours of work for a piece. It happens I don't believe in selling stones, no more than air, water or earth. I sell hours of passionate work.
Rocks are witnesses of our past. Ours ? Our earth’s at any rate, and even that of our solar system... Which climates, landscapes, which mysterious destructive and creative processes shaped nowadays world ? Tectonics, collisions, pressure, temperature, cooling speed, but also wind, water, gas and organic matter... To look at a 500 million years old rock is like watching a geological movie that took place on a scale we can barely comprehend. Although rocks did not undergo natural selection as traditionally understood, they followed their own evolution process. They are our planet’s building blocks, and some of them even are suspected to have contributed to life’s earlier stages.