THE MEDALLION
After leaving the highway for a long time and walking through the Normandy countryside on dirt roads between forests and rivers, we arrive at the very end of a path where nature seems to have taken back its rights. You have to get out of the car and finish on foot to arrive in front of a small stone house where time seems to have stopped.
In the middle of the vegetation, on a damp winter afternoon, we meet Marc Petit, a dashing sixty-something, in a hybrid place that is both home, studio and exhibition space. A steaming coffee in his hands, in a warm atmosphere, lulled by the music and the crackling of the fire, he tells us a story, his story.
He then leads us into his studio, a small room in real shambles of clay filled to the ceiling with real treasures. This is where our medallions are born, lovingly shaped by this artist who long ago fell in love with a somewhat capricious material: pewter.
During a long afternoon, he shows us step by step how from this molten material our medallions are born one by one. It is with great emotion that we take turns taking a ladle of the precious metal from a rumbling machine from which our precious objects tirelessly emerge.
He then shows us how one by one, he polishes and reworks like jewels each of our medallions on this craftsman's table where hundreds of small works have been created over time. Marc explains to us where his know-how comes from, far from the school benches, at the foot of the Himalayas some thirty years ago with Nepalese jewellers.
It is very moved that we end our journey in the world of Marc, with the pride and the certainty that we will never again look with the same eye on each of the small medallions affixed to our motorcycles and surfboards.
