Sculpting Poetry with Valentine Herrenschmidt
The creative spark that Cassandra Goad and Valentine Herrenschmidt share is more than a common thread, it is an innate wiring within them both that is as imaginative, exciting and multi-dimensional as their individual crafts.
Valentine is renowned globally for her unique calligraphic sculptures, made from wire, exhibiting her first collection at Maison & Objet and nominated for the prestigious design prize, the Grand Prix de la Création de la Ville de Paris. She draws from all manner of texts, including famous French poems, plays, mantras and sayings, and uses free hand iron work to make the floating words in space and on walls in her signature curly cursif typography. Every line she shapes, moulds and writes, quite remarkably, is from a single length of wire.
Famous texts, spoken word and sculpture have cohesively meshed together throughout Valentine’s life. From a young age, Valentine nurtured a longstanding passion for creating “fantasy jewellery”, as she calls it, making one-off pieces for friends and family every year. This passion continued alongside years in the acting spotlight, during which time Valentine performed in countless theatre productions in Paris. Jewellery finally took centre stage in 2009 when Valentine stepped away from acting and studied jewellery design at the Haute Ecole de Joaillerie, creating her first piece of calligraphic jewellery “La Vie Est Belle”.
After developing her craft of jewellery making and sculpting in space with metal wires, there was a magical turning point for Valentine. She met Claude Picasso, the artist’s only surviving son, igniting an idea for a collaboration. Inspired by Picasso’s one-line animal pencil drawings, sketched without lifting a hand from the paper, Valentine wished to capture the spirit of Picasso’s animal drawings in jewellery, reproducing each animal identically in continuous golden thread. With unique access to Picasso’s archives and sketchbooks, Valentine reimagined the famous animal sketches, including birds, camels, bulls and flies, into three-dimensional golden sculptural pieces of jewellery named “La Bestiaire Picasso”.
Valentine now takes commissions of all shapes and sizes, from minute quotations to vast garden sculptures displaying declarations of love. Notably, she was honoured with the task of sculpting a wreath to commemorate the anniversary of D-Day at the British Normandy Memorial. Transforming personal and meaningful words into works of art is a passion that Cassandra and Valentine both share in their bespoke creations, whether in jewellery form, like Cassandra’s Quotation Pendants, or Valentine’s pieces of sculptural calligraphy.
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