IN CONVERSATION WITH INDIA MAHDAVI
WonderGlass: Can you describe the underlying concept of Clover and Pistil?
India: Clover, the chandelier is a hybrid between grapes and a bouquet of flowers. The colours are not exactly like the ones of a bouquet as the petals are black, but the stems themselves are green, which speak their own language. When you see the piece it is really quite stunning. And Pistil, the table is like a zoomed-in part of a flower. Both pieces are very stylised and look a bit like cartoons, but the quality of them is super sophisticated. That is something that I often do, taking things from Pop Culture and integrating them into my work.
WonderGlass: Why did you choose flowers as motifs?
India: Flowers have started to become an obsession for me in the past two to three years. For me, flowers reincarnate the perfect position that the world is in today. They are so fragile, in the same way, that our world is fragile, as they only last for a certain amount of time. They make us realise the fragility of the world and that the beauty of what we have might disappear. Recreating them in a resistant material like glass shows their fragility while at the same time preserving their beauty. I also created a paint collection called ‘Flowers’, so the pieces are part of that work, which is me trying to say: Wait a minute, you know we have this beauty right under our eyes – it might disappear and it’s fragile, let’s take care of it!
WonderGlass: I love how the connection is made between nature and the Pulegoso glass. Each glass ball is different. On the one side, the difference is in the bubbles that are forming in the material, and on the other side, there is the imperfect shape of the glass balls.
India: For both pieces, we worked with two different glass techniques, glass blowing and glass casting. The bubbles in the blown glass of the chandelier are added through sodium, which creates these perfect imperfections. And then in contrast to that is the table made by glass casting, which has a smooth and nice finish on the one side and an almost imperfect structure on the bottom side. For the chandelier, we galvanised the metal of the stems to make them green and somehow this whole bunch of materials work great together.
WonderGlass: This is not the first time you have worked with WonderGlass, is it?
India: Collaborating with WonderGlass as such, yes. But we have been working together previously on commercial projects. What I love about working with WonderGlass is that when you come up with an idea, nothing is impossible. What Maurizio will do, he will go and after a certain amount of time, he just comes and has a sample right there. And it’s put together already, like magic. It’s a very different way from working in France because there you have a process. You have to go see the manager and discuss it and make all the effort of going there. With WonderGlass it is like, okay, Maurizio is gone and with his resources, he will go and find all the different possibilities of making things.