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credits: @lisbonbylight
Creator of unique and precious jewelery, Valérie patiently imagines and creates gold jewelery with colored natural gemstones in her open-workshop in Paris .
She likes to play with the lighting by working with the different materials, by creating volume and contrast, granules and textures.
In 2001 Valérie went to live in Africa, in Chad where she stayed ten years. There, she discovered the world of metalworking with Chadian artisans: cast iron, forge, cutting, filigree… tecniques that she would later reproduce in her workshop.
Back in Europe, in Portugal, Valérie did a professional jeweler training at the Contacto Directo School then at the Centro de Joalharia de Lisboa and graduated in 2014.
Since 2019 Valérie has been selected to participate in Révélations, the Crafts and Creation´s International Biennal at the Grand Palais in Paris.
The BEAUTY of CONTRASTS
COLORS and MATERIALS
Silver and Gold
Valérie began by mainly working with silver, creating rings for the most part, with generous dimensions.
Then her work evolved towards increasingly thiner volumes, jewels where every detail, every fine granule, every light texture takes on all its importance. Then the color of the traditional Portuguese 19.2 carat yellow gold imposed itself.
This hot gold, very close to Chadian gold gives both a delicate old-fashioned character to the jewelry and, by contrast, allows a harmonious enhancement of the colored stones.
Gemstones
Valérie is particularly fond of tourmalines. She loves the vast palette of their tones and the inclusions often present in these gems. Colors and inclusions make each stone unique.
She likes to associate the softness of cabochons with the luminosity of faceted stones, to play with the shades of tourmalines or, on the contrary, to assume the contrasts of pinks and blues.
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The Granulation
She makes each granule and welds them one by one. Each granule is unique, the desired result is not perfection but harmony, accuracy.
For some larger rings, the granules are arranged in rain until they form a gold or silver foam.
For her thiner jewelry, the challenge for Valérie was to succeed in soldering a fine line of granules on the setting of the rings or on thin hoops, without these granules being held by any support, as if in suspension.
The desired result is the simplicity and lightness of the design.
credits: @lisbonbylight
The Textures
Valérie rarely polishes her jewelry, she prefers to play with materials.
She creates different textures to gently capture the light and give depth to the jewel through the effects of contrasts.
A texture made at the stall on the setting brings a soft luminosity around each stone and highlights the softness of the cabochons.
The ring of the jewels is most often sanded manually by crossing the ridges on the metal.
The areas close to the granules are sanded uniformly in order to obtain a matte finish which contrasts with the fine granules which are themselves always polished.
The ring edges are also polished to create a contrast and ensure optimal comfort.
The Creative Process
The African influence is strongly present in Valérie's work. The fine metal granules are still present, of course, bringing back to antique jewelry, but for Valérie, it mainly reminds her of African jewelry.
Valérie very rarely uses the technique of sculpting jewels in wax. She does not work from 3D software and goes very little through the drawing stage. She imagines and creates each piece of jewelry by directly manipulating the metal.
Her work is manual and closely linked, physically, to the material.
Each piece takes shape little by little through the manipulation and progressive shaping of the metal. A basic idea around a gem always changes during the creation of the gem. The final jewel invariably differs from the original project.
What allows Valérie to find the right place for her creativity in working with metal is the slowness of the process, the need to anneal, then beat, then to anneal the metal again to shape it. This slow imposed rhythm gives her time to think about the harmony and the details of the future jewel which takes shape little by little.
credits: @lisbonbylight
Harmony
Each part of the jewel, each detail is thought out and produced with patience to create volumes and contrasts, combining softness and luminosity.
Selection of stones, shaping of the metal, choice of size and arrangement of granules, application of different textures ... a long, patient and delicate work of research for harmony of colors, materials and volumes
