Jenna Kaes

L'Almanach 26 : Jenna Kaës

Jenna Kaës (1987, Saverne, France)

Jenna Kaës (born in 1987 in Saverne, Alsace) is a French designer and artist living and working in Paris. She comes from a family of craftspeople in Alsace, a French region known for its highly specialized craftsmanship. At the intersection of design, art, and craft, her practice explores a central question: how to give material form to the mystical and spiritual in a predominantly secular contemporary world.

Trained at HEAR (Strasbourg), and then at ECAL in Lausanne, where she earned a Master’s in Design for Luxury and Craftsmanship in 2016, very early on she developed an interest in highly-skilled craftsmanship. She collaborates with prestigious firms such as Hermès, striving to experiment with the variety of their techniques and skills, while also exploring various materials. Her deeply experimental approach gives consideration to the expressive and symbolic qualities of each material.

Her series of works Fadets (2024), made of four hybrid sculptures combining leather and blown glass, developed out of her residency at the Tardoire leatherwork in Montbron. 

During the Hermès Foundation residency, the artist was given carte blanche to produce works in collaboration with the craftspeople of the workshop, namely Cécile Coiteux and Emmanuel Villette. Immersed in a territory notable for its powerful landscapes and rich folklore, she draws inspiration from the fadet figure of local legend (a creature that can be associated with an elf or a fairy), as well as bat imagery. 

Jenna Kaës works with scraps of black tanned leather, taking advantage of their roughness. These pieces of leather are attached to a brass framework forming large wings around a body made out of hand-blown glass (produced in collaboration with the master glass blower Simon Muller at the glass blowing workshop Arcam Glass, near Nantes). These hybrid forms call to mind beings that are both fascinating and unsettling, between animality and spirituality. They fully embody Jenna Kaës’s approach: creating objects that do not merely exist, but operate as sensitive mediators between the tangible and the immaterial.

Jenna Kaës also works on small series of household objects—candlesticks, armchairs, sconces, or even jewellery, as well as large scale projects like the stained glass windows for the Saint-Martin de Monthuchon Church in Normandy and the new artistic columbarium in the La Chartreuse Cemetery in Bordeaux.