About me
I worked for over twenty years as a lawyer in Lyon. A grueling, stressful life, an office life during which I was neither comfortable nor fulfilled.
A need for air, to feel the seasons, to walk in the grass, to smell the flowers, to hear the birds singing, to look at the stars…
I needed to get away from this city life, to breathe, to feel alive.
Towards botanical dyes
It’s been a long road: the purchase of a ruined house and the months of building work to make the renovation as eco-friendly as possible.
Then, the creation of a garden from fill soil. I learned a lot: about plants, about myself. Over the years, I’ve seen my garden grow: a garden in motion, not too fond of order, where old roses mingle with herbs, a garden that welcomes all spontaneous arrivals, a garden where the wild rub shoulders with the most distinguished, a garden enlivened by the dance of butterflies mixed with that of dragonflies, a garden lulled by the flight of carpenter bees and foraging insects.
Today, the garden is my refuge where I like to contemplate. This love of plants slowly led me to plant color.
The birth of Teinture Sauvage
It’s in this propitious environment that it has become possible to make a color that’s 100% plant-based, natural and ecological.
More than just a possibility, it has also become a matter of course, a requirement, an experience and a coherence.
- An obvious choice: Teinture Sauvage was born… to practice an artisan activity in the countryside, to immerse oneself in ancestral know-how, to use the riches of nature without impoverishing it, to create entirely natural colors using ecological processes.
- A requirement: The botaniocal dyeing process is also a slow and demanding one. Just as in the garden, you need to know how to observe to understand what’s going on. You need to intervene wisely, knowing how to dose without rushing the plants, otherwise you risk damaging and destroying them. This process of revealing color is exhilarating. The senses are awakened: the sense of smell with the scents released by the baths, the touch of the natural fibers, the sight of the color of the juices, that which rises gently on the fiber.
- An experience: I love the experience of creating and revealing the color of plants. And since nature is inherently generous, the color offered by the plant, by plants, is not the expression of a single colorant, but of a multitude of colorants. This is the signature of plant colors: rich, deep colors. Plant coloring is a way for me to commune with nature: I feel it, I sense it, I sketch the contours of its hidden treasures.
- Consistency: And finally, undeniably, it’s an extension of my entire philosophy of life. I have this precious feeling of being coherent in the way I act, in what I do, with what makes sense to me, respect for nature.
Today, we live in a complex, fast-changing world that is reaching the end of an untenable paradigm that is destroying our natural environment. That’s why, when I weave, I reconcile: it makes sense.
That’s what I’d like to share with you as you discover my botanical dye kits with natural, alum-free mordants.