Isabelle Fish

An interview with the founder of The Club, by Rue Pigalle, an international network of craft patrons based in Toronto, Ont.

What is your job title and description?

I’m the founder of Rue Pigalle, which is an international community of women championing crafts and nurturing craftspeople through events, conversations, master classes and journeys. We support artisans and makers by connecting them with people who appreciate their work.

I am a strong believer in the intrinsic value of manual intelligence and in the importance of the role that artisans play. I feel passionately that supporting crafts and nurturing makers ultimately fosters a kinder and more connected society.

How do you describe your work?

Rue Pigalle is first and foremost a community. As its founder, I am a community builder and a curator of craft experiences, and I am also a patron of craft myself.

There are two main aspects to my work. On the one hand, I am constantly searching for new makers across the world; I get a thrill out of discovering craft that has a strong message or story, where the artisan is showing exciting innovation or putting an old skill to different use.

I look for integrity in the making process, as well as the story behind it. Sometimes these stories relate to questions that perhaps we haven’t thought about but we should. I see makers of both functional and decorative craft as agents of change — they ask us to consider difficult questions through their work.

The other side to my work is in building this incredible community of women. It’s easy to get isolated at any age, but this sense of community becomes more important as we get older. I create connections between women who share an interest in and a passion for the world of craft. I get immense pleasure out of connecting women to the makers but also in connecting the women to each other — it is an incredibly valuable exchange. Creating this sense of community gives me great, great joy.

What career/educational path did you take to get here?

I consider myself a craft “insider” rather than an expert, as I have no formal training. I am self-taught, having learned by osmosis, passion, listening and learning. I started Rue Pigalle as a brick-and-mortar operation with a small boutique in Toronto, named after the Parisian neighbourhood where you’re often pleasantly surprised to find beautiful and unexpected things. I realized after a while that it was too limiting for me so I developed a Salon to address the ideas and conversation side of things, which soon evolved into women-only international trips to experience craft in specific locations.

Before setting up Rue Pigalle, I spent 15 years working as a corporate lawyer in the pharmaceutical industry. I have noticed that makers don’t always think in a businesslike way, so I am sometimes able to help with that. 

I grew up in an environment where art and craft were revered. Everything in the family home was made by small-scale artisans and local craftsmen — it was a very different approach to acquiring functional objects.

During my childhood we spent one month overseas every year. Wherever we travelled, we would visit studios and ateliers. My mother would bring back trunks full of objects and craft — everything from cooking pots to sculptures. A lot of these pieces have been passed on to me.

There is a rich mix of cultural influences in our family: I am French and my mother was Greek. My husband is South African — his mother was British and his grandparents were Lithuanian. We moved home every four years due to our careers, so there was always a lot of cultural discovery taking place. 

That sense of cultural inheritance and of moving between different cultures was very much a part of my upbringing and has remained an integral part of my adult life, and I bring this sensibility into my mission at Rue Pigalle.

What is the most exciting part of your work?

I have two great moments of excitement: The first is when I discover a maker doing something that I haven’t seen before. The other is when I have a patron who forms a connection with an artisan and their work.

Supporting craftspeople has an impact that extends beyond an isolated financial transaction. When you buy a piece from an artisan, the positive effects ripple outwards to the family of the maker, their suppliers, their local community, even to their apprentice. That support nurtures an entire network.

I do not take a commission when a sale is made. Clients know that my recommendations come with integrity and are based solely on my belief in the artisan’s work. Making these matches gives me immense pleasure.

What is your biggest challenge?

My biggest existential challenge is to get my voice heard against all the background noise. I believe that what makers are doing and what Rue Pigalle does are important, and getting that message across is a big challenge.

I’m a one-woman operation at the moment, but the business is growing. The biggest practical challenge so far, as well as the biggest opportunity, has been the pandemic. I had to almost instantly switch to a completely digital model. Now the challenge is to decide where the mix is going to land, and to constantly adapt to changing local circumstances.

That sense of adaptive response can be seen in the evolution of my business: From shop to salon to trips to the Rue Pigalle Club. As soon as the pandemic hit, I moved to curating and presenting interactive trips and events online, which has been hugely successful and has brought Rue Pigalle to a whole new international audience.

We’ll be back on the road in autumn 2021, when I’ll be leading a trip to the United Kingdom. We’ll have a mix of in-person and digital events. It will be in collaboration with London Craft Week, and we’ll visit the studios and showcase the exhibitors. These events will also tie in with other craft events in Europe.

I will continue to digitally bring along an audience that cannot travel with me to open doors and make these connections.

Tell us a brief story about an object you have worked with.

In our partnership with Crafted Vancouver, I talked to two makers who I thought were incredible.

The first was Brendan Tang, a ceramicist. I’ve been really blown away by his work. His work displays many influences such as Asian art, manga, his Irish birthplace, his South Asian and Jamaican heritage, contemporary Canada and Afrofuturism. He has a very multicultural background and his work strongly questions identity: how people are seen, how he sees himself and how he is seen by others. 

The second is Michelle Sirois Silver, a textile artist. We’re of the same generation, and her self-portrait piece “Adapting” really spoke to me. It shows her dealing with — and to some extent becoming undone by —  technology. As we get older, it becomes more of an effort to stay current. I’ve had to rapidly learn about technology as I do all my own social media and presentations on virtual platforms. We have to really force ourselves to do it, so we aren’t cut off from our children and society and the new digital landscape and all its opportunities, but it’s both exhausting and hugely energizing to be pushed out of my comfort zone!

Isabelle Fish is the Founder and Director of Rue Pigalle, an international community of women dedicated to championing crafts. A former French-US lawyer, Isabelle’s vision is for a kinder, more connected society through crafts.
w: ruepigalle.ca
ig: @ruepigalletoronto
li: Isabelle Fish

This article was published in the Fall/Winter 2021 issue of Studio Magazine.