Elise Fouin's Chimisterie Vase

For this exhibition, Élise Fouin offers a series of stunning objects as the point of departure for a series of scientific borosilicate glassware, created by students in the glassblowing section at the Lycée Dorian in Paris. Élise Fouin’s intervention on these objects, normally thrown away at the end of the year, aims as enhancing them with new shapes and giving them new functions. After they are recovered and a set of transformation drawings prepared, the pieces are reworked by blowtorch and complicated by protuberances, pouchlets or feet.

As is often true of her work, Élise Fouin here breathes new life into objects slated for the scrap heap despite their great technical complexity. The artist’s intervention refines them, exploiting the transparency of the material to create vases and lamps, turning a test tube or vessel confined to a research laboratory into an everyday object.

These transformed objects are all versions of upward single-stem flower vases on the same principle as Granville Gallery’s 2010 exhibition “Candélabres: Lueurs intimes” [Candelabras: Intimate Lighting].