When a Digital Communications Expert Meets a Medieval Flower

After completing her communication studies, Solène spent a few years working in-house. As a child of the 1990s, she was entrusted with tasks related to social media, which soon became her specialty. Her desire for independence led her to set up her own digital communications agency. To make up for all the time spent in front of screens, she returned to jewellery-making, starting with a white bird. As people often asked where she bought her creations, she began to consider opening a small online shop – an idea she approached as a game, too.

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She chose to call her little business Hello So – a name that bursts with spontaneity and sunshine. At first, she sought to capture the porcelain-like whiteness in her jewellery. As she delved deeper into the subject, she came across the cobalt blue of Chinese and Japanese porcelain. From there, the leap to waide was a small one – or almost. Her partner helped her take that step by suggesting the meaning that woad blue could bring to her jewellery, linking it to Amiens’ past. But this pigment is demanding and complex, and takes time to master. It is photosensitive and fades in sunlight, as Solène discovered when she left a piece outside for several weeks: all the colour on the sun-exposed side had vanished. This prompted her to experiment to improve the lightfastness of her creations.

Always eager to learn more, she grew fascinated by the history of this resilient plant, upon which Amiens built part of its wealth during the Middle Ages, and whose captivating past she enjoys recounting. Solène could have chosen indigo to tint her jewellery, but she preferred woad, which suddenly gave her creations a whole new meaning.

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The twelfth-century passion for blue sent this dye plant sailing down the River Somme to England, where the textile industry consumed vast quantities of it. The woad merchants were thus able to help finance the construction of Amiens Cathedral. The lower sections of its walls, adorned with friezes of stylised woad plants, seem to bear witness to their generosity. Perhaps they symbolise the part this modest flower played in building the cathedral. There is another clue: the cathedral’s south façade pays tribute to the woad merchants in three tiers. At the bottom, two kneeling figures pray before an inscription in medieval Picard, which explains that “The good people of the towns around Amiens who sell woad built this chapel with their alms.” In the middle stands a couple, both woad merchants, with a sack of woad balls at their feet – balls made from crushed woad leaves, from which the precious blue pigment was obtained. At the top, a statue depicts Saint Nicholas, patron saint of merchants. Exploring the cathedral’s façade and interior as though leafing through a picture book reveals further depictions of woad, illustrating the important place this blue gold once held in Amiens.

 

Jewellery as a Connecting Thread

Although the Hundred Years’ War put a damper on the flourishing woad trade, manuscripts and technical treatises helped preserve the knowledge and techniques involved in extracting its pigment. In the sixteenth century, imports of indigo into Europe gradually displaced woad in northern France and then in the Pays de Cocagne, as the Lauragais region was once known. Indigo was easier to work with, contained a higher concentration of colouring matter and proved more profitable. Yet it never entirely supplanted woad in the collective memory of the people of Amiens or those of the Pays de Cocagne. Today, a handful of enthusiasts are helping to revive interest in it in both regions.

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Solène is one of them. Some of her creations, however, are bound up with deeply personal stories of attachment to the Somme and are far more than mere pieces of jewellery. The young woman tells of an Italian man whose wife, originally from Poix-de-Picardie, was homesick. Since Hello So does not ship abroad, he took it upon himself to drive all the way to the French border to collect the piece he had ordered. Solène also recalls two twin sisters from Amiens who now live in Marseille and longed for their home city. And then there was a woman from the Somme who ordered three pieces of jewellery: one for herself, one for her sister and one for her mother. They were to serve as reminders of her father, a native of Amiens who loved wearing blue and had told them the story of woad.

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Some of the pieces Solène makes by hand also connect their wearers to Amiens through their symbolism: the four-petalled woad flower with its six golden stamens, the beads recalling the woad balls, or the drop shapes evoking the River Somme, along which the precious spheres were transported. Yet all the young woman’s creations are also an expression of her personal journey, her passion for the history that lives on in walls and places, and her love of the plant world. They beautifully illustrate Solène’s playful approach to design, guided above all by her curiosity about people and nature. And in the freedom she gives herself to imagine things and bring her own ideas to life, there is still something of the little girl who once began making her own creations with a pair of jewellery pliers.