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Nathalie
Fleurisanne Engraving Artisan
After training in a minting company and patient practice in imagining three-dimensional shapes while perceiving the sculpture in the making within the material; after alternating between repeated failures and beautiful hopes, she finally mastered this ornamental art, turning her passion into a profession. Seated at her workbench, the artist designs the volutes and other motifs on the Swiss watch movement bridges herself, using a pencil, all freehand, a technique requiring perfect mastery of volumes and shapes. Using a sharp-tipped graver she marks the component before removing material around the floral motifs so as to add relief. The flowers appear to emerge from the previous metal like bas relief sculptures. That is however not enough to embellish a Swiss watch movement Fleurier-style: the background must also be finely chased, dot by dot,
with the same graving tool. She then polishes the motifs, a highly perilous task given the difficulties involved in polishing gold, which is an extremely soft material that scratches easily. Decorating the movement of a limited edition of just eight Swiss watches takes one full year of work. Only some luxury watches pass through her hands, but they are unmistakably ennobled in this process. Some of her tools are 15 years old: files for removing shavings; punches; as well as gravers which she makes herself, sharpened and polished so as to ensure no trace is left in each engraved groove. In this wealth of detail, the importance devoted to the human touch and to beauty is clearly perceptible: it does indeed take time to embellish time.
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Karl-Friedrich Scheufele