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Le Tanneur x Amélie Dubois
When it comes to creativity, everyday life is a remarkable starting point. Where we craft leather goods, Nantes-based visual artist Amélie Dubois imagines visual poetry instead. Through her collages, the founder of Maison Moche delights in transforming the “little nothings” of daily life into evocative images. Habits, objects, gestures, and memories become the very essence of her work.
We invited her to swap, for the duration of a project, her medium of choice, paper for colorful leather offcuts, in order to create artworks for our shop windows. In her studio, we asked her a few questions about this collaboration and about this new way of bringing leather into dialogue with everyday life.
Meeting with Amélie Dubois
I need to surround myself with a great many objects that reassure me and inspire me. I’m an avid collector, so I hunt for and gather small objects here and there, especially paper. There is a great richness in paper: it comes in countless varieties, with different patterns, weights, and textures. I also take great pleasure in decorating it. Paper is my starting point, everything else flows from there.
Collage is an easy way to represent what’s in my mind. I’m not a very skilled drawer, and collage allows me to move things around, to change them, nothing is fixed. Before gluing anything down, you can decide to completely change it. I love being able to start over, go back, and create different stories with the same elements, so the story is always in motion. What also makes collage so powerful is that it allows you to play with shadows, textures, and layering. That’s where it becomes interesting and alive, perhaps even more alive than drawing.
We wanted the handbags to embody characters and to imagine their lives and stories, a meeting, a phone call we’re waiting for, a courtyard window, suggesting the city without ever fully showing it. We envisioned a romantic or friendly weekend, strolling through a museum or a park, then taking a break for tea. Just a simple day. The handbags would play the main characters in an “extraordinary, not-so-extraordinary story.” From there, I had complete freedom to build the story we would tell together this season. I was given a blank canvas.
I approached leather as if it were paper, a precious kind of paper. It cuts differently, it glues differently, so you have to find little tricks, but it’s a material that offers new possibilities. I used it flat, like paper. Working with leather meant engaging with a noble material while exploring some of the qualities of paper: the veins, the pores, the edges. I started by selecting the colors, then moved on to the textures. From there, I lock myself away and create “my recipe.” I really enjoy working in miniature, it allows us to get a close sense of what the final piece will be. Once approved, we move on to full-scale execution. For this project, it was about translating the miniature into human scale. Seeing collages come to life at human size, interacting with the wind, the threads… it was wonderful.
I felt like we were working together to write the most beautiful story possible. And the goal wasn’t to keep doing what I already know how to do, but to venture into the unknown. Working with Le Tanneur felt natural and straightforward to me. They highlight craftsmanship, the skill of the hand, and artisanal work, something I find absolutely wonderful. It’s a French house that embodies values that are both touching and very much of the moment, while also preserving its history at the heart of its activity.
I can’t wait to see each scene come to life in the shop windows, to see how sunlight transforms our tableaux, and to see the bags arranged inside these settings. I’m really excited to see the final result.
