Albane Salmon, sculpting wood, sublimating matter. 

Albane Salmon is a cabinetmaker. Under the nameAtelier Sauvage, she develops an aesthetic inspired by nature, creating solid wood pieces that straddle the border between sculpture and furniture. Based at JAD since December 2022, she intends to affirm her creative approach and nurture it through collaboration with other artisans and designers.

With this in mind, and on the occasion of the Printemps de la Sculpture (March 24 - 26, 2023), Albane Salmon has begun work on a monumental sculpture in collaboration with wood sculptor Maxime Perrolle, during a live sculpture open to the general public. From June 1 to 4, 2023, her work will also be exhibited as part of the Emergences Biennial in Pantin. An opportunity for Albane Salmon to look back on her career and talk about her workshop project and life at JAD. 

What does the event you proposed to JAD for the Printemps de la Sculpture consist of? How does this monumental sculpture project fit into your creative process?

Printemps de la Sculpture is an event organized by the Hauts-de-Seine and Yvelines départements. Over the course of a weekend - this year from March 24 to 26 - the general public is invited to discover sculpture in all its forms, from ancient heritage to contemporary creations. Alongside the Musée Rodin in Meudon, the Manufacture de Sèvres and the Château de Sceaux, the JAD brought its own vision of sculpture, marked by the dialogue between art and design and the hybridization of know-how. Maxime Perrolle and I offered the public a live sculpture, during which we began work on a monumental sculpture that we will continue to work on over the coming months, and which we hope to complete by September 2023.

This project is rooted in Maxime's and my shared desire to change scale by working on a sculpture of imposing dimensions, which takes us out of our comfort zone and constitutes a real exploration on a technical level. What's more, working on a creative project more concerned with formal abstraction than functional objects echoes Maxime's approach as well as my own. Indeed, while I mainly create functional pieces of furniture, my approach to woodworking is actually more akin to sculpture than cabinetmaking in the traditional sense. 

This creative project also draws on the JAD territory. The sculpture is made from sections of very old oak from the Saint-Cloud estate, whose greenhouses face the JAD buildings. Moreover, from a formal point of view, this sculpture is inspired by the interlocking and totemic forms Ettore Sottsass created in the 1990s at the Cité de la Céramique, next door to the JAD. We wanted to stay close to the original formats of these massive sections, so as to reveal the trees behind these wooden pieces, and pay homage to them. 

How did this vocation for woodworking come about? 

Initially, I wasn't destined for cabinetmaking, but I was quickly drawn to working with materials. I grew up in the Alps, in a family and social environment where the culture of making was central. Wood in particular attracted me, and I had the intuition that furniture could be a creative vector in which I would flourish. 

So in 2015, I took a CAP in cabinetmaking in evening classes with the Mairie de Paris. It was in this context that I met Paul Demarquet , with whom I co-founded Atelier Sauvage around a common approach: that of creating furniture by combining arts and crafts and design. Together, we learned a great deal by doing, an approach I still pursue today, believing that everything can be improved and that there is always room for learning and improvement.

How would you describe your approach at Atelier Sauvage? What are the recurring principles or elements that structure your creative work? 

I mainly work on solid wood objects at the crossroads of sculpture and furniture. I pay particular attention to the material: in addition to favoring locally-grown species, I work with wood in the mass, as this allows me to go into its thickness and shape it to give life to curves and roundings. My approach is therefore more that of a sculptor than a cabinetmaker, more concerned with the poetry and immediacy of my relationship with the material than with the pursuit of technical prowess. 

What are your creative methods and sources of inspiration? 

In my work, I favor contextualized creation: starting from constraints stimulates my creativity and imagination. For example, when I designed the furniture for theHôtel de Ville in Pantin, I drew inspiration from a fresco depicting a scene from Arcadia painted on the walls, using its colors to create a link between the room's 19th-century decor and the contemporary bias of the furniture. In fact, this project is quite representative of what nourishes my creativity: nature, painting and art in all its forms.

Nature, its colors and the way it shapes the environment are a great source of inspiration for my creative work. In particular, I try to transcribe certain phenomena such as erosion and the smoothing of pebbles by water, phenomena that make nature even more beautiful and interesting because they give it a history and move me greatly.

I also draw inspiration from the work of artists such as Matisse, sculptors like Noguchi, JB Blunk and Brancusi, and from disciplines such as tapestry and ceramics. They all feed my research into color and my formal approach to objects. 

How does JAD fit into your research and creative process?

I've always worked in collaboration, from the founding of Atelier Sauvage with Paul Demarquet, to the research I carry out in dialogue with Marie de Lignerolles around color. Today, I'm pursuing this approach at JAD, where I moved in December 2022. I'm nourished by my proximity to other craftsmen and designers, and in particular by the presence of other skills such as weaving, which I'd like to cross-fertilize with my woodworking to give life to a hybrid material with innovative properties. 

In addition, JAD's mission is to raise public awareness of the importance of dialogue between art and design. This aspect of the project is very close to my heart. It's also with this in mind that Maxime and I proposed live sculpture at the Printemps de la Sculpture: creating a monumental sculpture in public, which will eventually be exhibited outdoors, is to my mind a way of putting a little poetry into everyday life. It's also an opportunity to show how things are made, and to inspire the younger generation by showing that creation is at the heart of our business.

Interview by Brune Schlosser

In charge of cultural and heritage projects at INMA

and INMA correspondent at JAD