Flat and smooth, the pebble looks like the ones any child has picked up on a beach. Who has never come home with their pockets full of pebbles they found beautiful during a walk? This pebble waited on a shelf for forty years before being handed over to the good care of Emi Drapier. This metal craftswoman based in Lyon riveted the stone to a steel base and erected it vertically, like a sculpture.
“The friend who entrusted me with this pebble had received it from his brother, who had glued a shell mouth and eyes to it. At over 50, he was very keen on it: it was a gift associated with a happy childhood memory and with the Ile de Ré, where he was born. The stone has remained flat for years, without showing its face: today it has regained all its pride! », says the craftswoman, who admits a “great tenderness” for everyday items. Her workshop is overflowing with finds and the glass roofs that she creates with the end of the blowtorch.
This former interior designer reconverted into the metalwork industry creates made-to-measure cabinets of curiosities in steel, intended to house souvenirs and personal objects that are left for her like a precious jumble. Trinkets brought back from travels, stopped watches, candy boxes, glasses from an ancestor, fossils and shells… A treasure of little, a legacy of small things, but of very high sentimental value.
“We all have objects in our homes that we can’t bring ourselves to throw away, but which live in oblivion. However, if you still have a pebble after five or six moves, it’s good that it has great value in your eyes! Mounting the objects on a plinth, putting them on a pedestal, and then placing them on a shelf immediately gives them back an intimate value. We put them back on stage, we give them the floor, they become a support for the memory again”, enthuses Emi Drapier, who named her brand Éloge de la banalité.
On the niches of her first cabinet of curiosities, made for herself, she placed her grandfather’s fountain pen, a spool of kitchen thread, a Gruyère grinder… “This aluminum reel is straight out of childhood. I can still see my mother telling us “here, do you want some Gruyère cheese?” and hand us the piece of cheese with the grinder that had to be turned, a not easy gesture for small hands. »
It is also through her own memories that Stéphanie Surer, jewelry designer, began, transforming her “jewels of a young girl and of a first love” into a series of rings, ready for another life. After more than twenty years in advertising, this former artistic director transforms inherited, abandoned, broken or outdated family jewels into new bracelets, rings and necklaces.
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