GlassWear: Paragons of Light in Contemporary Jewelry - Tapa dura

This bilingual catalogue of a touring exhibition (recently at Pforzheim, next stop in April 2009 is Rochester, NY) brings home the inventiveness that can imbue materials with value that outshines their intrinsic worth. Most of the 60 featured makers are jewellers rather than glass artists; some employ sophisticated techniques to realise their ideas, others collaborate with skilled glassmakers to achieve the forms they want, or avoid the process altogether by assembling their work from beads, glass objects and found fragments. Besides containing a useful history of glass as jewels, subtitled `an uneasy relationship', a good deal of the book is devoted to arguing the case of jewellery as art, though as the authors cheerfully admit, 'often enough this discussion of how their work should be classified has taken place amongst the artists themselves, naturally without coming to a definitive conclusion'. For the rest of us, it's just a pleasure to see what is being produced, classify it as schmuck or kunst. -- Adornment, Vol. 7, No. 1, Spring 2008

This handsome book was created for the exhibition of the same name which has just ended at the Schmuckmuseum in Germany and will be on view at the Museum of Art & Design in New York City in 2009. It is an interesting subject and a feast for the eyes. ... GlassWear is the first survey of glass in contemporary international auteur jewelry. ... This publication dazzles with jewelry made with and of glass, which is notable for the great delight in experimentation and extraordinary nonconformity practiced by its makers. ... In this generously illustrated book, it is the artists who have the last word about their special relationship to glass as a material. In the text section, scholarly, yet highly readable essays by the authors who are leading experts on jewelry ... shed light on glass jewelry from many different angles. ... This book is recommended to anyone who is interested in contemporary jewelry and also for anyone who is enthusiastic about glass design --Design Arts, July/August 2008, No. 6

Jewellery and glass enter a symbiosis. Comprising 60 objects by artists from around the world who deliberately use glass in their jewellery, this is the first survey of its kind. The authors begin by placing glass jewellery in its art historical context: the high status enjoyed by glass in jewellery design goes back to ancient Egypt or Rome. Paste jewellery in 18th-century France and 19th-century Bohemian glass jewellery are world-renowned. In the early 20th century, Louis Comfort Tiffany and Rene Lalique of course also used glass in their creations.The jewellery shown here is stunningly experimental, revealing an extraordinarily non-conformist take on jewellery as such: it ranges from reticent to histrionic. Every work in the book celebrates the enigmatic qualities, sensuousness, colour and reflecting properties of glass. The use of borosilicate glass has made some objects special indeed: borosilicate glass makes it possible to use exceptionally thin yet durable elements in a composition whereas dichroic glass, which changes colour according to the direction of the incident light, produces intense colour effects. In other objects, novelty results from the innovative use of traditional glassworking processes.