SOLVENT SCALE

The co-operative project ‚Solvent Scale‘ includes glass vessels that originally had been used to recover industrial solvents. These large vessels with standardised shapes and measuring scales were formed in an open-air blast furnace, built specially for this purpose in 2011. The resultant deformation of the glass elements is not an end in itself, but a by-product or consequence of the liquidised measuring scales. Rather than striving to render the vessels, and by extension the industry, dysfunctional, Walde aims to change their functionality.

This concept was already being developed in smaller elements in the series ‘The scent of the fading alpine rose’ in 2009-10. Here the enlarged laboratory vessels were partially filled with the perfume from alpine roses. For decades this process had been carried out for the soap factory Walde by a perfumer from Bayern. Martin Walde’s grandfather had already realised that fading alpine roses had a special, powerful-smelling aroma. We can only imagine its potency in an air-tight melted glass vessel.

Although production of the alpine rose perfume stopped some years ago, the aroma on the tools which were in use at that time can even today still be smelt.