Jardins secrets

The exhibition “Secret Gardens” brings together fourteen craft artisans along with the Citémômes association in a sensitive dialogue between contemporary creation and the living world. Glass, textiles, paper, ceramics, porcelain, and natural fibers become the mediums for a poetic exploration inspired by plants, animals, water, light, and minerals.

Through delicate and distinctive works, each creator reveals the beauty of materials and the richness of natural forms. Balancing fragility, craftsmanship, and imagination, the exhibited pieces invite visitors to slow their gaze and rediscover the details of living things. Bridging traditional craftsmanship and contemporary expression, this exhibition celebrates an art of making that is attentive to nature, to gestures, and to the subtle connections that unite us with our environment.

We invite you to discover these explorers of nature: the CITEMÔMES association – Knit a Smile, Catherine Bailly, Laurence Bernard, ICÔNE | Caroline de Fraville, Pauline Faure, Thierry Garance, Amandine Gollé, Héléna Guy Lhomme, Julie Johnson – Secret Garden Glass, Simone Perrotte, Zoé Pignolet, Claire Pontié – Amabilis Atelier, Marie Rancillac, Catherine Romand – Romand’art, and Andréa Vaggione.

Join us on Saturday, June 27, from 2:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. for our workshop “Knit a Smile: Together We Are Monet 2026” at the Ateliers Saint-Cyr pop-up store. The event is free and open to all.

With a background in artistic training and self-taught in glassmaking, Catherine Bailly works with lampworked glass using a torch.

Her pieces are inspired by everyday nature—the kind that grows at our feet. Grasses and humble plants become her favored motifs. Each element is shaped by hand and then assembled into compositions of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of components. Through their accumulation and transparency, these fragile landscapes interact with light and invite a close, attentive observation of the ordinary plant world.

Website Instagram

A painter and textile artist, Laurence Bernard captures the ephemeral rhythm of water, the movements of fish, and the reflections of the sky.

Based in Audierne, near the Pointe du Raz, Laurence Bernard transforms the imperfections of 19th-century canvases into visual and tactile narratives. Through her works, she invites the viewer into a sensitive, almost meditative immersion, where fish and water become metaphors for the fluidity of existence and the harmony between the individual and their environment.

Her medium: antique canvases made of linen or hemp dating from the 19th century, carefully selected for their past life, their texture, and the traces of wear they bear. Her gestures—painting and red-thread embroidery—highlight delicacy and fluidity, inviting a sensory journey.

More recently, the Porcelain collection, created in collaboration with Atelier Ter, extends this artistic exploration. It features lighting pieces and porcelain plates, hand-painted or screen-printed, where material and movement echo one another.

Site internet Instagram

Designer Caroline de Fraville conceives her lighting pieces as inhabited presences. With a background in fashion styling and interior decoration, she brings her perspective on materials into play to create works that stand at the crossroads between design objects and sculptural art.

Under the name Icône, she asserts an aesthetic of duality. Her work explores the tension between the deep matte quality of hand-painted cotton and the reflective transparency of glass. The pictorial gesture—free and intuitive—rests here upon the architectural rigor of brass and iron.

Each piece results from an alchemy between the emotion of the line and the high standards of fine craftsmanship. By orchestrating the expertise of glassmakers, brass workers, and ironworkers, Caroline de Fraville offers not merely a source of light, but a striking visual experience designed to redefine the character of a space.

Website Instagram

In her work, Pauline Faure sculpts and represents nature.

She explores different worlds and their inhabitants, seeking to enhance the forms and colors of nature in order to raise awareness of its beauty and infinite richness. To evoke even greater emotion and wonder, she has chosen to work with a common material—paper—giving it an extraordinary dimension.

The fragility and delicacy of this material remind us that living creatures and ecosystems must be treated with great care. Fascinated by the unique qualities of paper, both fragile and strong, she draws a parallel with the natural world around us. Sculpting living forms with this material becomes a source of endless experimentation and discovery. A graduate of the École Supérieure d’Art et Design de Valence and the Arts Décoratifs de Strasbourg, she completed her studies in 2015.

Website Instagram

Thierry Garance relentlessly explores new forms to express the world and to invent its narratives. A multidisciplinary visual artist, he moves fluidly from sculpture to painting, from installation to video, from animated series to immersive environments. Each project finds its own language, in a constant search for accuracy, resonance, and poetry, with the aim of provoking emotion, moving the viewer, and awakening the senses.

His career—embracing a deliberately eclectic approach—has been shaped by decisive encounters, from his early committed work at Charlie Hebdo to immersive exhibitions. More recently, it has led to the creation, in collaboration with Procédés Chenel, of a new form of sculpture: Honey Sculpt. After five years of research, he now presents works made from Drop Paper (60 gsm), a material with remarkable properties—flexible, expandable, and suitable for painting and animation. This new medium has become, for him, a territory of expression driven by subtle, liberating humor.

Website Instagram

Amandine Gollé is a printmaking artist whose work is inspired by the vibrations of nature and the energy of the world.

Through prints created on large wooden panels, she seeks to reveal the invisible and to share imagined visions and memories. Her practice—meditative and repetitive, like a mantra—erases the notion of time and extends into a performative approach: she chisels, scratches, rubs, and strikes the material to create immersive environments.

Trained at the Nancy School of Fine Arts (2007–2012) and influenced by time spent in Madrid and Wuhan, she embraces a sensitive relationship with the world: “I move through the world… and let it move through me as well.”

Instagram

Héléna Guy Lhomme is a textile artisan and visual artist. Her vocation took root in artists’ studios in Moscow and later evolved in France, as she moved away from the rigidity of ceramics and bronze toward the plasticity and craftsmanship of working with wool. She subsequently developed a strong affinity for this ecological material—born of both human and animal production—rich with echoes of a feminine history.

Website Instagram

Originally from Scotland, Julie Johnson discovered glassblowing on the island of Sark, where she completed a three-year apprenticeship. She then continued her training in Great Britain before settling in France in 1994. She worked in various studios as a glassblower, and in 2003, she established her own workshop in Brittany. For twenty years, she developed a production activity open to the public there, while also pursuing her own personal research.

In 2023, however, she chose to return to essentials by creating Secret Garden Glass, an intimate space where she works alone. Inspired by nature, her pieces belong to a poetic universe: she explores the material through precise gestures, giving rise to unique works.

Website Instagram

Simone Perrotte’s work consists of creating entirely handmade, one-of-a-kind decorative ceramic pieces, born from her research into forms, materials, colors, and graphic patterns inspired by the plant and animal worlds. Her motifs are also sometimes applied to paper and textiles to create installations resembling “imaginary landscapes.”

All her pieces are unique and entirely hand-built or wheel-thrown using Limoges porcelain, then painted and engraved by hand with black or colored slip. They are finished with a high-temperature glaze and enhanced with touches of gold, platinum, or overglaze colors.

Website Instagram

Zoé Pignolet is an embroidery artist whose work lies at the crossroads of art, craft, and design.

Trained at the École Duperré in Paris, she worked for seven years as an embroidery designer in haute couture before developing her independent practice in Lyon. Inspired by a sensitive observation of the plant world, her works explore a dreamlike nature through thread, material, and light. Between surface and volume, embroidery becomes sculptural, revealing textures, reliefs, and subtle vibrations.

Website Instagram

Claire Pontié trained at the Strasbourg School of Decorative Arts within the “contemporary jewelry” studio. Chasing and hammering are the techniques she particularly values and began developing around plant-inspired forms.

After graduating, she adopted the name Amabilis Atelier to create handcrafted jewelry conceived as a tribute to the treasures of nature. Each piece is inspired by a plant, animal, or mineral element with a distinctive charm, inviting us to rediscover and cherish the species from which it borrows its form.

Balancing personal interpretation and faithful representation, each piece of jewelry is first designed and then handcrafted at the workbench. Using sheets and wires of brass and silver—cut, filed, hammered, chased, soldered, and polished—earrings and necklaces take shape in her Strasbourg studio before being sent to a specialized artisan for gold plating.

Website Instagram

After studying fashion design, Marie Rancillac turned to sculpture, a more solitary practice better suited to a slower, more contemplative pace.

Since the beginning of her work, she has drawn inspiration from nature, particularly ephemeral plant forms. She regards them as precious objects, extracting from them naturally beautiful shapes. Fruits and vegetables become sculptural subjects, shaped in grogged stoneware. Transformed through modeling, they take on a second life—both lasting and dreamlike. A lover of still lifes, she reinterprets their codes and attributes distinct personalities to forms. A fig becomes meditative, an eggplant sensual, a turnip assertive, and a squash engaged in dialogue with its base.

Her pieces are built and assembled from coils of clay, then fired at high temperatures. She then applies colored slips, leaving certain areas raw to create a two-tone effect. Balancing figuration and abstraction, she seeks harmony and celebrates a consoling nature in the face of the world’s chaos.

Website Instagram

A graduate of ENOV, Catherine Romand practiced traditional basketry for nearly 25 years in Villaines-les-Rochers before evolving her work—alongside her husband Christophe, a willow grower and basket maker and Meilleur Ouvrier de France—from rattan to willow, and from furniture to basketry.

She creates original, made-to-measure pieces combining willow, wrought iron, leather, and wood, spanning fine basketry, furniture, sculpture, living willow, and lighting. Renowned for the quality of her craftsmanship and the distinctive identity of her creations, she received the SEMA “Coup de cœur” award in 2003, established her own studio in 2010, and was honored in 2024 with the “Intelligence of the Hand” prize from the Liliane Bettencourt Schueller Foundation. She also takes part in professional trade fairs.

Website Instagram

An artist and designer of Argentine origin, Andréa Vaggione discovered contemporary jewelry in 2001 in Córdoba. She then moved to Barcelona in 2005 to train in forging techniques at the El Taller de Joyería school, before settling in Lyon in 2012. Winner of the “Talents de Mode” competition, she established her boutique-studio at the Village des Créateurs, where she continues to develop her practice and business.

Her artistic approach seeks to enhance living forms and to pay tribute to the generosity of nature. Her work explores transformation, movement, and the cycle of birth and rebirth through refined, intimate jewelry that expresses both strength and fragility. Moving from micro to macro, she captures the ephemeral—flowers, insects, glimmers, colors—and transforms it into a lasting, poetic, and sensitive nature, inviting each person to wear a dream and write their own story.

Website Instagram