The SoulFetish colour scheme is limited to black and white with a few touches of red. From the SoulFetish website to the showroom and packaging, there is no exception to the harmony of this rule.

Why has this trio of colours been selected?

The combination is no accident, correlating with my French origins and my interest in Alchemy.

All that is mysterious intrigues me.

As a child I would often wander through the ruins of feudal castles and into churches. I was quickly drawn to symbolism and became interested in secret societies, unaware that I was beginning to acquire the cultural understanding which would fuel my future inspirations.

Each colour, then, has an alchemical meaning?
That is correct. Each colour represents a stage in the cycle of the process of internal healing through transmutation. Transmutation is the process of transforming ordinary metal into gold. By extrapolation, it is what allows a crude soul to become an accomplished being, by knowing each facet of the individual’s personality and by exploiting its full potential.

Black seems to be your prefered colour, what is the meaning behind it?

A black work, or nigredo, is chaos, putrefaction, the decomposition of the body and the separation of the elements it is made up of. It is the death essential to any rebirth.

I have experienced several black works. These can be, to the uninitiated soul, an angst-ridden descent into hell. Man is confronted with the most heinous of his demons and his flaws, but also with his qualities. The shadow of the black work has been my primary source of inspiration for the Lust and Revolution collections.

It is as in the upstream journey in Apocalypse now, a film that I revere; sex, violence, gambling, all of these vices are represented, but it is above all the initiatory journey at the heart of the narrative which carries importance.
Finally, if the colour black has such a strong presence in my universe, it is simply because I feel at ease with it.

And what of the white?

The white work, the albedo, is the individuation and the reconciliation of the opposites. It represents the harmonisation of chaos and the recognition of opposites. According to Jung, it is the death of the ego which enlightens the soul.
The light shows darkness, and the darkness shows the light. This equilibrium must be maintained.

If we were made up solely of qualities, recognized by our contemporaries, we would fall into a kind of sterile self enchantment. This is the opposite of what I need to create my pieces.
It is our flaws which encourage us to reflect. When all is well, nothing incites change, and thus only those familiar with black work persist in attempting to surpass themselves. Working in white is to clean, to polish constantly, an endless task. This is an ideal pursuit for a jeweller; every day, I polish.

And the occasional touches of red?

The red work is the last stage of the Great Work, which ends in the rebirth of a new being. Each of the purified elements which we were once made up of are heated by the fire in the alchemical athanor, in order to be recomposed as a harmonious and complete being.
It is the realization that we were already what we had been searching to become.

Red appears only in touches in SoulFetish jewellery, as the journey is more important than the goal.
SoulFetish is my great alchemical work. It is an endeavour of perpetual personal development  which I attempt to share with the world. SoulFetish represents 15 years of work from a team of artisans in the search for the perfection of their art and of their personal achievements.

SoulFetish is our Philosopher’s Stone, and its gold is the knowing of vacuity.

Article by Frederique Morel for Revolia.