“At Christmas, an Italian man would sell little figurines made out of glass. He was making them in front of us and I was fascinated by the way he worked and sculpted the glass,” recalls Nathalie, who is now based in Wem. “When I was a teenager, I told my parents I wanted to work in stained glass but they were worried about me doing it in Paris and thought it was too risky.
” Nathalie went on to practise fine art and worked as a guide in both the Musée d’Orsay and the Modern Art Museum of the Pompidou Centre in Paris. But her dream of working with stained glass never left her and in 1995, now in her 20s, she moved to the UK to study stained glass art in Swansea and later in Wrexham. “I came to the UK because I had read a book in a library in Paris about stained glass and students in Swansea and I found their methods and techniques very inspiring.
” “Also, in France, at the time, some people didn’t believe it was a job for women,” she adds. Before leaving France, Nathalie was surprised to learn that she was following in the footsteps of one of her ancestors. “I told my granny I was going to do stained glass and she said ‘have I never told you that my father worked in glass?’ I never knew, I was shocked.
“His name was Alexi Bouyer. He worked in the glazing industry in the 19th century and did stained glass. She gave me two pieces of glass he had blown and engraved,” she says.
Nathalie moved to Shropshire in 1998 and established what is now known as .