Glass jewelry – Artisanal creation

Glass is a strange material. It takes you in and surprises you, requiring extreme technical rigor while at the same time teaching you to let go, to let go. 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 when you open the oven. While laughing, you examine his proposals, 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.

A glass plate is deformed around 630°, as 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 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 favorites are the dichroic lenses, which vary in color depending on the angle from which they are viewed. They have a color 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, no brackets. For a minimalist result, chains or semi-rigid necklaces go through the glass.

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

The gold stars of the -Under the Stars- 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. Temperatures of -40° generate ice up to 1m thick. It cracks, creating structures as it compresses and expands with temperature variations.

Each piece of jewelry is unique and that’s the joy of it. The patterns formed by the tears in the gold, the gold dots in – Under the Stars – and the cracks in – Baikal Ice – are random. Their dimensions also vary slightly.

Chtttt, I don’t tell you more … At the time of the glassmakers of the island of Murano, they imprisoned those who revealed the secrets of manufacture.