A pronounced talent for design leads Nathalie Seiller Dejean first to graduate from the École Nationale Supérieure Des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and then to work as an illustrator for Le Monde and other newspapers.
It is a pair of shoes, painted for a friend, which changes her creative destiny. Indeed a famous Parisian shop notices them by chance and asks her to work with them. From that point on Dejean begins fantasizing about the idea of distinctive accessories and, reworking lace and precious materials from the past, discovered at local markets, she creates jewelry and accessories for hair that enchant designers and art galleries
The most poetic turning point, however, occurs some twenty years ago, with Switzerland, where life takes her; here, her passion for late nineteenth-century passementerie encounters the world of straw.
“I was in all the Swiss cantons and in their markets, searching for these wonders,” explains Seiller Dejean, who, inspired by “rediscovered” nature, cuts and shapes by hand rough or already braided straw, transforming it into dream-like tiaras with a rustic charm, extremely rich in detail. “Wheat, symbol of universal prosperity, is equally celebrated in history by kings and peasants: it is no accident that the goddess of agriculture, Ceres, is depicted with a crown of wheat.”
To make them even more luminous, the golden brilliance of these jewels, ancient in essence but with a contemporary lightness, is obtained by dying them with tea: all natural, done in a completely homemade manner by the artist herself.
Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.