Interview with William Amor in SLOW MADE by Loic Sellin
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THE ALCHEMIST’S FLOWERS
A soiled plastic bag discarded on the sidewalk is transformed into a rose, and old cigarette butts into marquetry. William Amor is an alchemist of the discarded, a magician of abandoned matter.
She is particularly inspired by the world of flowers.
For him, there is no such thing as waste. It’s all a question of perception and value judgement. William Amor had this intuition the day he left his native Lorraine village and moved to Paris. Until then, as the only child of a craftsman and a secretary, he had lived in the midst of nature, where there is precisely no waste, because everything is transformed:
The living creates the living again.
Even as a child, the man who describes himself as “hypersensitive” was fascinated by the flowers he collected and carefully arranged in his herbariums or grew in the small corner of the family garden reserved for him:
Nothing can compare to the beauty of flowers. It’s the purest expression of seduction.
Turn me into a flower…”
After dropping out of school, the young Lorrain moved to Paris. Faced with all the garbage littering the ground, he is astonished:
“Why so much waste and indifference? “
A discarded plastic box speaks to him: “Turn me into a flower…”.
To continue the cycle of life, because by dint of despising our scraps, we’ve ended up forgetting where they came from.
“Like plants, they have an organic origin. It’s raw material. Dinosaur juice.”
William Amor alludes to the time, 300 million years ago, when living beings (plants and animals) forged the sedimentation sludge that would become petroleum. Our plastic waste thus comes from our mother nature, sublimated by the petrochemical industry, “like gold and diamonds, which started out as mere pebbles”.
As a self-taught plastic artist, he embarks on his mission. Step by step, day after day, William Amor gives a new destiny to the bags, cigarette butts and containers he picks up on the Parisian asphalt, just as he once did with flowers in the Lorraine countryside.
For me, waste is the seed from which new beauty will grow.
He washes, scrapes, colors, heats, triturates, embosses and sculpts these detritus to transform them into roses, daisies, tulips, ornaments, embroidery and plant walls. He fumbles around, armed with the tools of a jeweller, a floral decorator, a sculptor – a whole panoply of arts and crafts.
He doesn’t search, he finds, and is astonished to obtain a material even more subtle than silk and as pure as crystal. The most unlikely scraps can become resources.
Thus, to magnify the bottle of a prestigious Piper-Heidsieck cuvée, he scrapes the bottom of champagne vats where tartar clings, extracting crystals from which he shapes jewels. Through these gestures of ennobling neglected materials, William Amor sends out to the world “messenger creations”, aesthetic and poetic, dedicated to Beauty and “the eternal living”.
Kenzo, Balmain and Dior… a parade of big names praise him
In his Parisian studio at the Villa du Lavoir, his works fascinated and moved visitors, and soon attracted the interest of the major fashion houses.
Its bouquets, floral garlands and ornaments decorate and enhance perfume bottles, haute couture dresses and jewelry by Kenzo, Balmain, Christian Dior, Balenciaga and Chopard…
Winner of the Grand Prix de la Création de Paris (2019), the Fondation de la Banque Populaire (2019) and Rémy Cointreau (2020), the most noble institutions are showering him with laurels. His works have been exhibited in museums such as the Musée des Arts Décoratifs and the Musée Massena in Nice.
Beyond decorative art, his imagination leads him to create magical installations such as the Théâtre de la Métamorphose for Lancôme in 2023: a 25 m² room where thousands of flowers, stamens and pistils play with light and pastel colors in an evocation of what paradise could be.
Or the stunning Envolée poétique suspension sculpture at the Salon Révélations, Grand Palais (2019). His work is obviously a hundred leagues away from the upcycling (and the simple artificial representation of the flower. William Amor is a plastician-archaeologist of our modern world, a poet who blurs the boundary between art and craft, transforming abandonment into epiphany.
Unlike Magritte, who proclaimed “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (This is not a pipe), he can claim “Ceci est bien une fleur” (This is a flower) for his creations from our garbage cans.
Loic Sellin
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