Contact her on @opheliecazalens
My parents and grandparents were electricians, my great-grandmother was a glove-maker and my uncles were farmers. A family that has spent its life working tirelessly.
My origins are at the heart of my work. In fact, I'm fascinated by the people who contribute and dedicate their entire lives to cherishing the world. I'm fascinated by the people who contribute and dedicate their entire lives to cherishing the world, by the professions that persist despite physical and financial hardship, and by the men and women who are passionate about passing on exceptional values and knowledge to future generations.
Each of my works is above all the result of human encounters. They are the stories of passionate craftspeople who, by sharing their lives, their stories and their trades, inspire me and fuel my creative process. For me, being an artist means being constantly on the lookout for what makes us human, through skills, traditions, objects and stories handed down from generation to generation. It is this humanity, this link between past and present, that I seek to capture and translate in each of my pieces.
The origins
Since childhood, I've been fascinated by the beauty that lies in things that last, gestures that are passed on, stories that are told, beliefs that we imagine. A lifelong draughtsman and graduate of the Ecole Boulle, I now devote my time to promoting shared narratives and imaginary worlds.
Know-how and tangible and intangible heritage are the bearers of stories and beliefs that help us to understand the world.
As a young designer, I feel invested with a mission: to transmute the world of design by exploring ancestral practices and know-how, through the creation of unique pieces. My work is deeply inspired by my Mediterranean roots, where the spirit of community and intergeneration plays a central role. My jewellery is forged with the ambition of creating objects of art and transmission, embodying stories, ancestral legacies and historical beliefs.
Through my creations, I celebrate our heritage, what has been handed down to us by our ancestors. So fragile and priceless. Today, without oral transmission, without visibility, without deep belief, without love, they disappear. Because I love hearing the stories of my grandmothers, the smell of my native Camargue, the sound of ringing bells in the fields, wearing my jewellery, understanding the traditions of my elders, pampering my old photographs, watching herds of bulls and sheep go by, observing for hours the gesture of an old craftsman, planting flowers, eating tieilles and raspberry tarts, fleur de sel, going to my village festivals and cherishing the world.
My relationship with jewellery began when I was a child, when I inherited rings from my great-grandmothers. With their priceless sentimental value, the materialization of a love that we wear.
My creative process
There are many issues at stake as a designer today: future imaginaries, resilience, modes of manufacture and production, political and territorial issues, etc. Through pastoralism, I am seeking to explore the capacity of design research to produce rooted knowledge. This research, which is both archaeological and current in the territory, encourages the designer to produce something different, to look at the heterogeneity of practices as a creative source in diverse fields with which we choose to establish a correspondence. This sensitive excavation invites me to bring the human and social sciences into dialogue with the applied arts, situating the field of creation at the heart of an irreducible knot that articulates an immediate relationship with the world.
In my objects, reality and narrative are superimposed, crossing imaginary worlds with which I draw alternatives.
My creative process brings together common and local narratives, jostling today's practices with those of yesterday, meeting the real and integrating the narrative, not archiving but superimposing the multiple. A perception of possible futures in pastoral narratives and practices.
Each piece is entirely handmade in France.
Ophélie, from @opheliecazalens