Handmade

Glass is an enigmatic material. It takes you in and surprises you, requiring extreme technical rigour while at the same time teaching you to let it take its own course, let it do its own thing. It is a great pleasure to transform it, as well as a privilege. It looks inert or even cold but wait for a ray of sunlight to shine through it : it then begins to live, changing at every moment.

Each firing has a surprise in store for you. It is when you open the kiln and see the result that you have to imagine new techniques, new forms, new effects. Measuring yourself against the glass is a journey, but it is the glass that decides the destination and this journey has no end.

Glass plate is deformed at around 630°, like for the bending of windshields. The matte surface, after being sandblasted or worked with diamond tools, becomes transparent again around 770°. It softens more and more to melt between this last temperature and 830°. It will flow like honey from 900° and the blowers work it at around 1150°. The field of creation is infinite. Each glass has what is called a coefficient of expansion, which is the rate at which it softens and cools, and you can’t mix glasses with different coefficients.

My favourites are the dichroic lenses, which vary in colour depending on the angle from which they are viewed. They have a colour by reflection and another by transparency, with all the nuances between the two.

I like to play with its optical properties. The magnifying glass effect concentrates a line of light or a point, depending on whether the jewel is shaped as a tube or a half-sphere. The models Alpha, Feminissima and Hera are cylinders, more or less flattened by the high temperatures. The latter have no fasteners nor brackets. For a minimalist result, chains or semi-rigid necklaces go through the glass.

I apply liquid gold with a brush in the L’intemporel, Dolce Vita and Kokoro collections. It brings its warm and bright aspect.

The gold stars of the Sous les Etoiles collection are laid down in two layers, which give the jewel a fascinating depth effect.

The Baikal Ice collection was born from a Winter crossing of Lake Baikal in Siberia : the temperature of -40° generates ice up to 1m thick. It cracks, creating structures as it compresses and expands with temperature variations.

Each piece of jewellery is unique and that’s the joy of it. The patterns formed by the gold dots in Sous les Etoiles and the cracks in Baïkal Ice are random. Their dimensions also vary slightly.

But I won’t tell you more … In the past, glassmakers from Murano Island were imprisoned for revealing the secrets of their manufacturing process…