The beautiful artistic complicity of the glass designer and the cutler

the essential
Artisan in Conques, Amélie Péret shapes glass beads to create magnificent contemporary jewelry. His partner, Nicolas Dubus, is a cutler. From their artistic complicity, remarkable glass knives are born, unique pieces, true pieces of Art decorated with various materials.

Under the heat of the flame, the glass rod undergoes its profound metamorphosis to become a pearl. The fruit of long years of practice, precise gestures and precious know-how learned from a master glassmaker from Murano. In her La Fage workshop, Amélie Péret creates wonderful contemporary jewelry, combining glass, gold and silver but also copper and precious stones, plants or insect shells. An alchemy of materials for unique pieces, artist jewelry and high jewelry of accomplished aesthetics, which can be found in its boutique in Conques, the Art Pearl.

Prestigious jewelry

After living in the Bay of Somme in Picardy, Amélie and Nicolas, her companion, discovered Aveyron after Amélie obtained a teaching position as an applied arts teacher at the Aubin vocational high school. Fallen under the charm of the village of Conques, she decided to take the plunge and open her boutique there in 2011 to present her creations. After studying art history, aesthetic option and sculpture, Amélie Péret began blowing glass with Luigi Boscolo, a master glassmaker from the island of Murano, in the Venice lagoon, renowned for its long tradition of glassmaking. . This passion has never left her and Amélie’s Alkémia creations have long attracted a wide audience. On the heights of Pruines, in its “little corner of paradise, its garden of Eden in Aveyron”the glass designer draws her inspiration from the lush nature that surrounds her, in contact with the animal, plant and mineral world. Affiliated with the Ateliers d’Art de France, she has worked for renowned stylists and collaborated with several architects, designers and other decorators. A princess from Saudi Arabia wore one of her necklaces, a long necklace made of glass and 24-carat gold leaf, and several of her bottle jewels are now in Dubai.

Blasted wooden knives

A metallurgist by training, Nicolas also worked for several years as an educator in the social field before also turning to artistic crafts. First to support Amélie in her boutique workshop in Conques, then to strike out on her own as an artisan cutler. “I always had an eye for Amélie’s creations and, at one point, I went behind the blowtorch in the boutique workshop, explains this big guy. Subsequently, I had the opportunity to take over a cutlery factory in the village of Conques. The main condition was to maintain the cutlery business.” Selling other people’s knives is good, making your own is even better. After training with Denis Bourdon, in Grand-Vabre, and Johann Lemire, in Sainte-Eulalie-de-Cernon, Nicolas began making his first Lamco-branded knives. Although he continues to offer, in his shop, the creations of several Aveyron artisan cutlers, he now has his own line of knives with blasted wood handles, his trademark. Among other projects, in traditional cutlery, Nicolas will manufacture a limited series (fifty copies per year) of knives whose handles will be made with timber from the Conques abbey church, dating from the beginning of the 19th century…

Real objects of art

You had to dare and Nicolas dared to use glass to make knives with, of course, the technical and artistic complicity of Amélie. First only the handles, then the entire knives and even a fully foldable glass knife, which alone required nearly 150 hours of work… To date, Amélie and Nicolas have imagined and created around twenty glass knives richly decorated with precious stones, glass beads, blown glass, gold or silver leaf, sometimes ceramic, coral, plants or insects sacred in their copper sarcophagus. Presented at various fairs, exhibitions and other specialized festivals, these unique pieces, true objects of art born from this endless alchemy of materials and their multiple effects, have already won over several collectors. While Amélie and Nicolas were in Montpellier, their glass knives caught the eye and curiosity of a young video director, Rija Gardiner. With his team, the latter came to Aveyron last year to shoot a documentary on Alkémia, which is scheduled for release in September. The opportunity to discover in images the astonishing and formidable four-handed work of the two artisan artists.