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DIMENSIONISM – Glassdress-Project 2020-2021

With the beginning of the Corona Pandemic at the beginning of 2020, my already quiet working day was once again downright decelerated. So suddenly an almost forgotten feeling came back, which I knew all too well especially from my early years of self-employment – time for experiments! I contacted the Dutch fashion designer Iris van Herpen, who I already knew from the FACE MASK-project of 2019.

About my suggestion to use this special time to create a glass plasma dress, Iris was immediately excited. After she analyzed my technical skills using glass fabric patterns, I got an outrageously beautiful dress design that actually seemed feasible for me. Thanks to a scale paper model, it was possible for me to see the highly three-dimensional structures. After more than 6 months of work, endless ups and downs and chronic “frozen shoulder” injury, the final result of the 7 kg glass dress. To top it off, the dress got an exotic xenon, neon, nitrogen filling that makes the object glow in moving green/blue light in the dark. The release of this technical highlight will be coming soon.

To my great fortune, after pickup in Amsterdam, my glass sculpture received maximum appreciation from Iris van Herpen, with high end model shoots following with incredible photo and film results. With Diandra Forrest a model was found, on whose body the dress seems to be literally tailor-made.

I would like to thank from the bottom of my heart all those involved, whose maximum effort made the realization of this unique DIMENSIONISM-project possible.

Technique:

At a nearly 2000°C hot flame (propane-oxygen mixture), the glass is brought into a viscous state and formed into the desired shape as a rod or hollow tubular glass freely by hand. A wide variety of profile shapes can be created with the aid of simple graphite hand tools and by using special techniques such as pulling, pressing, blowing and sucking. The big challenge was to transform a 2-dimensional paper design into a 3-dimensional sculpture body. One has a maximum of 10 seconds to shape a single glass segment into the desired form until the molten glass solidifies again. The decision of how long to pull a glass part with which diameter, wall thickness and bend in 3 planes has to be made intuitively in this short period of time. Thousands of individual parts were necessary to find out the right pieces that result in such a symmetrical and yet so organic shape with clearly given dimensions. Finally, all of these individual pieces are seamlessly fused together with smaller welding torches to form larger segmental pieces. Each finished structural part must be heated again during the night to 540°C in the furnace and slowly cooled back down to room temperature by the morning hours. . This so-called annealing process is necessary to free the glass from tensile compressive stresses that occur during the spot work. Only annealed glass can be further processed the next day without spontaneous breakage. Comparable to a jigsaw puzzle technique, countless individual parts are divided into segments, these in turn into 3 large segments (front cladding, back cladding, top part) and finally the final fusion is completed at 2000°C.

After about 850 hours of work and over 100 nightly annealing processes, the glass work was completed in January 2021.

The filigree dress sculpture has a total weight of about 7kg. This is only possible because the basic static structure was fused together from hollow glass profile tubes. After completion, this hollow structure was deprived of air and filled with a special noble gas mixture (xenon, neon, nitrogen). The inert gas is ionized via a high-frequency transformer connected to the glass body by an electrode. The result is the magical, moving, faintly glowing multicolor light show that we know in natural form as the Aurora Borealis, the Northern Lights.

Additional info for the glass professionals:

For my plasma art I use exclusively the borosilicate glass Simax® from the company Kavalier from the Czech Republic. Compared to other well-known borosilicate glass products like Duran® or Pyrex®, Simax® glass “glows” violet under UV light. This optically offset glass frame makes the Weinmayer plasma objects shine in a very special three-dimensional light. To ensure a super-elegant seamless effect, work should be carried out with absolute purity of type. This means that a connection between Simax® and Duran® is technically feasible, but creates a connecting streak that later makes the overall object clearly recognizable as a piecework of countless parts. A clean, clear, seamless appearing glass flow body reflects the skill of a glassblower.

On behalf of Iris van Herpen, a haute couture fashion designer from Amsterdam, a 1.5m large face mask was made in 2019 using rod net technique. The object adorns the shop window of the Swarovski Store on Kärntner Strasse in Vienna until 2021. Many thanks to Rhea Thierstein and Rudi Gritsch for the good cooperation and order placement!