They have become quiet bombs, memories of an eruptive past, of a magma suddenly petrified and the long dissolution to the future that awaits them. They became grails, bodies suspended in a transparent, impenetrable gangue, seeming to extract them from notions of provenance and duration. Then they become Origin. No obvious connection with the material they’re made of. They play on the ambiguity of what was, what is and what will be.

Technically, these pieces are glass-blown, enamelled and often hot-glazed with porcelain. The interaction between the nature of these materials, the heat exchanges when they meet and the thrust of a breath in this lava, which is closer to a mineral than to a hyaline compound, are all factors linked to a process that forms a whole and are inseparable from my approach.

More recently, sand lights have appeared. The materiality of the object is embodied in the genesis of the material. Here, glass is cast in sand, shaped so that it undergoes deformation as a result of the pressure exerted by the casting process. The shape of the object depends on its mass, the temperature of the glass as it flows, and the relative strength of the matrix. As one would do with a stone to obtain two singular entities, these pieces are sometimes split, after cooling, with a chisel. The fracture releases the contained shape.

Time seems to reveal glass’s ability to summon the poetics of the elements: water, air, earth and fire. Light travels across its surface, crossing it and prolonging it in reflection. It steals our attention like the flame of a candle, touching on what is perhaps most common in all of us, the possibility of a dream. This is the medium that most closely touches on the poetics of water and fire. The technique of glassblowing, conducive to certain metamorphisms, also nourishes the dreams that run through this journey between magma, air, water and earth. A link is established between the object and its viewer. Shocks, cracks, erosions and impacts explore the epidermis and plumb the depths to the absence of matter.

Pascal Lemoine (Saumur, 1973) lives and works in Chavagnes les Eaux, Maine et Loire, where he returned after 20 years of travel and experimentation with materials.