Born in Cairo, Nisa Chevènement grew up there before moving to Paris in 1965. Alongside a career as a psychologist, she has devoted herself to painting and sculpture — a passion that has inspired her since childhood. Her work has been exhibited widely in France and abroad, and is included in collections in Greece, Switzerland, Mexico, China, and the United States. She was awarded the Grand Prix de Sculpture from the Fondation Taylor in 2009, and in 2010 received both the Bronze Prize of the Artistes Français and the Honorary Sculpture Prize from the ADAGP

If NISA CHEVÈNEMENT expands her work as a sculptor to devote herself to jewelry creation, it is to engage with the body as closely as possible — that sensitive territory where art becomes ornament without mediation. Here, the body is both subject and object, a space of expression and resonance, where material harmonizes with the skin, the breath, and movement.

Pendants, necklaces, rings, bracelets: each piece is born from the same patient gesture as sculpture, worked, chiseled, and patinated like bronze. One can recognize Nisa’s hand in each work — a hand that shapes matter to reveal the memory of humanity: an humanity of origins, if ancient civilizations, of genesis and the sacred. In every jewel, the woman becomes mediator, bearer, and transmitter of an immemorial heritage.

A profound complicity arises between sculptures and jewelry. A detail of form, a tension of volume, a surface gleam can whisper the idea of a jewel; the transformation then becomes a necessity. The reverse path, however, remains rare. Working in lost-wax — a technique common to both practices — Nisa weaves an intimate dialogue between sculpture and ornament, between the permanence of bronze and the lightness of the body. Resolutely sensual and feminine, her work is imbued with the breath of the Orient, echoing her Egyptian origins. In her creations, the ancient gesture of the sculptor meets the grace of jewelry, and art, transformed into adornment, regains its sacred dimension.