Regenerative Craft

Ingrid designs and manufactures each item in her Vancouver studio, marrying techniques beloved by countless generations of goldsmiths and metalsmiths with modern tools and values that centre people and planet.

Ingrid Valou’s signature style evokes myth, fantasy and forest systems. Her studio practice centres craft and its myriad related processes as a means of regenerating communities and environmental systems.

Vancouver, where she lives and works, is built on the unceded and ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ / sel̓íl̓witulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.

Values

The art and industry of adornment is one of the oldest and most beloved in human history. But the planet we love is changing beneath us, and irresponsible practices poison our waterways, wells, soil and air while exploiting the vulnerable.

There is a growing global movement both inside and outside the jewellery manufacturing industry to pursue principles that can bring the way we live — and make — back into balance with the planet, built on a just social foundation.

This includes using post-consumer materials, recycling metals inside and outside the studio, conflict-free stones, and centring community. I commit to more.

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Instagram | @ingridvalou

PANICALE DAY 16 // In Which We Test Acorn Ink Recipes
I set aside the pot with its disastrous, concealed mess of acorn slurry. I had spent enough of the early afternoon hours attempting to get the day’s experiment of acorn “ink” to

PANICALE INTERLUDE PART TWO // An Accident in Vernazza
The oaken path down the mountain was silent, the sun warming our shoulders as it climbed the Lunigiana peaks.
We bussed from Licciana Nardi to Aulla and caught the train to La Spezia, but it was

PANICALE DAY 15 // IN WHICH WE CONTEMPLATE OLIVES PT 2
The olive leaves were cast in carbon, fine and brittle. The green wood had spit as it baked, raising tiny blisters on the twigs. I tilted the tin this way and that, admiring the tremors of irides

PANICALE DAY 14 // DOUBT AND INSPIRATION
The knowledge there was a bare three or four full residency days left lit a red coal of urgency that could be banked, but not extinguished. I reviewed the eclectic assembly of what I had accomplished with dism

PANICALE DAY 13 // IN WHICH THE DRAGON RISES
Today, I finished roughing out the dragon shape. The legs sprouted talons; the body and tail fanning fins, like a ginkgo leaf, like plum blossom petals. I may need to resculpt the head to better fit the b

PANICALE DAY 11 // IN WHICH WE REACH A MIDPOINT OF THE RESIDENCY
I woke in a funk. With no one to account for my time, with no plan, and a muggy head from having overindulged in grappa as I painted the night before, I listened to the bells toll, and

PANICALE DAY TEN // ALONE
“Send me photos,” she said. “I’ll see your posts, but keep me up to date anyway. When my leg is healed and I’m back on the West Coast, we’ll hang out.” I nodded. Celene had welcomed

PANICALE DAY NINE // PARTINGS
After seeing Greg away, I made my way back to Panicale in a daze. Any moroseness at our separation was balanced by an undercurrent of urgency to return to my work, and to play with the tools acquired from the antique mar

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Regenerative Craft

Values

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Instagram | @ingridvalou

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