IN THE PICTURE - Nathalie Bonnemaille

Jewelry, like all the arts, reveals societal changes because artists sense change, and even before philosophers or sociologists name it, they know how to transcribe the emotions that surround them into objects.
Imbued with our society (sick yet resilient, cocooned but taking international aspirations, seduced by technology however adept at up-cycling), jewelers today imagine the forms that tomorrow will bear witness to these mutations.
Nathalie Bonnemaille’s work is at the heart of this new jewellery landscape.
Like us, she seeks out the values of nature, but in a different way than Art Nouveau, which reflected a hedonism asserted in the presentation of a voluptuous, feminine yet threatening nature, the Strange Beauty.
Like everyone, it questions lines and geometry, but goes beyond the modernist spirit that celebrated a future that research hoped to transcend, and opposes the post-modernism that, under the guise of cultural access for all, praised consumerism.
Nathalie Bonnemaille’s jewelry creations borrow from libertarianism its spirit of freedom, choosing raw and natural gems, showing this inherent beauty. From transhumanism, she appropriates the benefits of research, of science and experience, by selecting perfect gems whose finest cut exalts manufactured beauty.


Inspired by today’s values that nobody has yet named, she reconciles the two. Not by opposing them, but by combining them: the same rough and cut gems coexist in shapes that combine the most graphic design with the almost brutalist hammering of the material. She honors humanity by magnifying in her jewelry the materials that embody our origins: meteorites, nuggets and even fossil gold.
Through her jewelry, Nathalie Bonnemaille take actions for a society reconciled between respect for nature and the grip of transformation, between mastery of the material and the immanent perfection of the earth.
Text wrote by Anne Desmarest de Jotamps (Il était une fois le bijoux…)