Glass

Dead Flowers.

This morning while going through my weekly design reading list I came across some work by artist and designer Marcin Rusak. There is something so refreshing about the Art Deco aesthetic that he has applied to his Flora collection. The line of of furniture, feels like it could have been made in the 1920’s and at the same time feels fresh and unique, in part do to the choice of materials used. Rusak’s new line is constructed in part by using real flowers that have been encased in resin to form the primary sections of each piece. Accented with a muted brushed brass, the line takes on a new, yet vintage feel. The Flora collection features hand made brass structures with blown glass, black resin, and dried flowers. The flowers are cast in the resin, which over time will shrink slightly allowing small slivers of light to pass beside them.

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Anabella Vivas 100 Percent Sand Vases.

Anabella Vivas has created a series of vases that investigate how the design process is benefitted by using natural materials during the creation of the object. Vivas, wants to create a balance between the materials used and the final outcome. To reach that goal on this project Vivas has mixed concrete and glass, both reliant on sand for their existence. Each vase is a balance of 40 percent glass to 60 percent concrete in materials use. Working with the most amount of sand possible in her concrete mix, Vivas was able to blow glass into the concrete vessel, because of the slightly cooler than normal temperature which helps to fuse the pieces together. Each piece is hand made and no two are truly identical. Each one has a unique textural qualities to it in both the concrete and glass components. I love the subtle tonal color ranges in the cast concrete combined with a minimal aesthetic. And the balance between the heaviness on the concrete and the lightness of the glass is simply sublime.

“emulsifier” – Thomas Medicus

This is fantastic. “emulsifier” is a hand painted glass sculpture by Thomas Medicus. The anamorphic object is made out of 160 glass strips. There isn’t a whole lot of detail on his website, but the video and stills below give you a pretty good idea of how this works, and would look in real life. I can’t imagine how long it took to put this together and the painstaking task of hand painting each strip and assembling it. This is a very, very cool piece of art.

ABSOLUT Glass.

ABSOLUT VODKA commissioned Designer Thomas Feichtner to design of a new vodka glass to compliment their new hand crafted small batch vodka , ABSOLUT ELYX. The vodka is distilled from wheat that is grown within a few miles of the distillery, in the original copper kettle from 1921 used by ABSOLUT.

Drawing inspiration from other design projects he has been working on, Feichtner created a three leg glass that is produced by hand with the highest quality workmanship of which was key to this vodka’s concept. The glass picks up formally on many of his previous works while retaining an independent character.

“I’m fascinated by the formal alternation between positive and negative, between sine and cosine. And here, I absolutely wanted to separate the glass’s body from the surface upon which it stands and thereby also create a visually independent and self-sufficient object,” Thomas Feichtner

To compliment the glass, and the special vodka ABSOLUT and Thomas Feichtner have created a unique cocktail to go in it. The “Absolut Feichtner” which is comprised of a bit of wheat syrup and lime juice, and a shot of Peychaud’s syrup and a dash of Angostura Bitters. I haven’t tried it yet, but the ABSOLUT web site describes it as “rather light in body with floral aromas, supporting the vodka’s natural taste. The soft coppery hue that refers back to its origin: The nearly 100-year-old copper kettle No. 51 in Åhus, Sweden.