London Design Festival 2014: in this movie produced by Dezeen for Perrier-Jouët, glass artist Jeremy Maxwell Wintrebert shows us the factory where the glass is being made for his upcoming installation at the V&A.
Wintrebert has been commissioned by champagne brand Perrier-Jouët to create a bespoke installation at the Victoria and Albert Museum for London Design Festival.
A continuation of an ongoing project called Human Nature, the installation will consist of hundreds of stacked glass cylinders.
"The idea behind Human Nature was having these very simple geometric, colourful shapes and bringing them into natural environments," Wintrebert explains. "What interested Perrier-Jouët was not just the contemporary aspect of that, but also the very organic nature of that story."
The glass cylinders Wintrebert will use to create his installation are produced by LambertsGlas, a glass factory in Waldsassen, Germany.
"This factory is one of the last places where they still make mouth-blown windows," Wintrebert claims. "It's the biggest one still running."
Usually, Wintrebert would blow his own glass, but the scale of the V&A installation made that impossible.
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"This is the first time that I've been part of a creative process with glass where I'm not actually making the glass," he says. "If I had to make a hundred and fifty cylinders by myself, it would take years."
The cylinders Wintrebert uses are actually an intermediary stage in the process of producing mouth-blown windows. Normally, the cylinders would be cut and reheated to create a flat pane of glass.
However, Wintrebert is just as interested in the process of glass blowing as the finished product.
"When I saw glass-blowing for the first time, when I saw hot molten glass at the end of a pipe, I just fell in love with the material right away," he explains.
Wintrebert's Human Nature installation for Perrier-Jouët will be on show at the V&A from 13 to 21 September at the V&A in London.
Dezeen will be documenting the final installation in a follow-up movie that will be published during the festival.
The music in the movie is by 800xL.
