Why and how I became a jeweller, by J. Fernand Orsini, from olmo in Castagniccia, Corsica.
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In 1967, I find myself at the Pentecost festival in Riez-la Romaine, Provence, where I used to spend most of my time as a child.
There, I meet a girl, Catherine, and I can't help but noticing the extraordinary silver bracelet,
with an unusual welded clasp, that she's wearing (i'm 17 at this time and I just graduated for a C.A.P. as an iron craftsman).
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When I tell her my interest about this unique piece, she asks me if I want to be introduced to her father, who made the bracelet.
- My first visit to his workshop is incredible. Everything is amazing : the smell, the warm intimacy of the shop,
a woman leaning on her workbench with a leather apron in her lap, and
a tall,bearded man with strong, large hands and a pearcing look.This man who creates jewels
like sculptures is Jacques LACROIX, an avant-garde
jeweller and designer who left Brussels and got settled in Moustiers Sainte Marie, where I met him.
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He shows me in a very fiendly way, and asks me, among other things, what I do for a living and what brings me here.
My answers seem to convince him, and he hands me over a hammer and a sheet of silver, gives several steady and precise hits as an example,
and asks me to continue. I realize I’m making Catherine’s bracelet, pounding on a piece of rail securely
hold between the jaws of a vice. 40 years later, this episode will inspire me one of my dearest creations, « Extrême-Sud, Hot-Extrême ».
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My creations are intented to all those Corsica lovers wanting to wear a glimpes of it around with them. Metal,
stone and coral are adequate elements assembling to ornate the origninal beauty of « KALLISTE ».
This « Island of beauty » deserves to be known and cherished. Sylvie, Sylvain and myself are trying,
through the pieces we create in our workshop in FOLELLI, to make it known and understood better, as beyond the sky,
mountains and sea, there is an inner and much deeper Corsica…Ours.
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