Artist, designer, humanist and visionary
Dominique Imbert, the creator of Focus, was born in Montpellier in the south of France in 1940. After studying literature in London and Paris, he became, ‘by accident’, as he puts it, an ethnologist in Alaska and an assistant chef in Manhattan, before being awarded a Doctorate in Sociology at the Sorbonne and becoming a history professor in a Paris lycée. After teaching for four years, he decided he preferred shaping metal to moulding young minds and gave up the blackboard for an anvil and a welding torch.

Tucked away in the foothills of the Cévennes, in a medieval village in the garrigue north of Montpellier, he took up his new calling with ardour: forging, welding and sculpting, heating and shaping metal. What drove him to defy the fundamental elements in this way?