PRESS RELEASE: Lydia Courteille Presents her new High Jewellery Collection, White Paradise
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This collection is an invitation to travel into a poetic world, unexplored, coloured by legends, where precious creatures evolve with wild animals. It's an ode to first arctic civilisations, where Myths and Humanity merge.
Origins During a trip to Tucson, I acquired a set of dendritic white opals. These stones immediately sparked in me the desire to create a diamond collection. The images then multiplied, and I needed to organize them. While observing the stones, several visions emerged, giving rise to many themes: the landscapes of the Far North, Indigenous art, Arctic fauna and flora, and later, the exploration of Nordic Viking legends, which notably inspired the more recent world of the series Game of Thrones. I invite you to discover this collection, imbued with a distant, cold, and captivating land, of striking beauty and sometimes hostile in nature, where legends can come to life.
Overview of a multifaceted collection:
1 - Landscapes of the Far North
2 - Indigenous art
3 - Fauna and flora
4 - Dreams and legends
Landscapes of the Far North First image, the simplest one: by playing with materials, I revisited my snowflake collection. To accompany the landscapes formed by the dendritic white opals, I chose to evoke cold by using baguette moonstones with bluish effects reminiscent of the tones of the Northern Lights, as well as diamonds that evoke snowflakes.
Indigenous Art
I looked for Native American works like this totem, which has an opening symbolizing passage into the Sky World to gain knowledge. I interpreted this part of the totem as a cuff, with the central stone representing the Sky World, surrounded by the same guardian spirits.
Hidden inside this pendant is a shaman wearing a bear mask to summon the stars, an animal that represents the creation of the cosmos and society for many Siberian peoples.
Fauna and Flora
These pieces depict animals that take on the color of snow for camouflage and that inhabit the Arctic seas at different seasons.
The bicolor tourmalines in these earrings evoke the f ight for survival, the struggle of animals preying on each other and leaving blood on the snow in this hostile world. In the foreground, more peacefully, a whale encrusted with gray diamonds breaks through the icy sea represented by an Australian opal, surrounded by floating icebergs.
Singing Winter
The central opal reminded me of a song by Robert Charlebois, Je reviendrai à Montréal, where he describes a gentle White Paradise and mentions the light of the Northern Lights “making blue roses and golden roses snow over the winter.” The lyrics inspired this ring.
Dreams and Legends
The White Paradise can only evoke Viking legends, the inspiration for Game of Thrones. I eagerly drew from this world of dragons, White Walkers, magical swords, and capricious gods.
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