World | India
Ferozabad glass art creates French artist's sculpture
The 4.2 metre high futuristic glass installation "The Precious Stonewall" was conceived by French glass artist Jean-Michel Othoniel.
- IANS
- Published: 00:00 September 6, 2010
New Delhi: The 700-year-old glass art of Ferozabad in Uttar Pradesh came to the centrestage of global contemporary art on Sunday with the unveiling of a 4.2 metre high futuristic glass installation "The Precious Stonewall" conceived by French glass artist Jean-Michel Othoniel.
The 5 tonne solid installation, crafted with 4,200 recycled glass bricks, decked with 150 glass bead necklaces and spread across 7.5 square metres of ground area was thrown open for public view at the Lalit Kala Akademi by Culture Secretary Jawahar Sircar and French Ambassador Jerome Bonnafont as part of an Indo-French artistic exchange.
The sculpture is the result of a one-and-a-half year experimentation with glass as an artistic medium between the traditional glass blowers of Ferozabad, known for its colourful glass bangles and necklaces since the reign of Ferozshah Tughlaq, and Othoniel, who has been working with glass solid art since 1998.
The artist has been working on designer glass bricks with Ferozabad craftsmen since January 2009.
Inspired by religion, the sculpture that rises like a bejewelled golden edifice from the ground is a brick-by-brick interpretation of the artist's vision of development and the evolving spiritual self that represents India, sources at the French embassy said.
"The sculpture is a result of my experimentation with glass in India. I discovered the primal force of this material of deep hues while working in Ferozabad in the heat of the furnaces and the dust of pigments. The thousands of bricks that this work is composed of were blown and polished to a gleam that are similar to burnished ingots," sculptor Othoniel said.
The work was a tribute to a pile of glass bricks "that often line the Indian roads." Unveiling the sculpture, Sircar said Othoniel's installation was a shot in the arm for the glass blowers of Ferozabad.
"The glass craft of Ferozabad has a rich historical lineage. Ferozabad, barely 40km from Agra, evolved as a glass hub spurred by the demand for glass by the Muslim princesses of the Agra fort," he said.
"It flourished as a centre of bangle craft in the 15th century and remained so for the next 300 years. After the arrival of the British, the glass blowers began to craft glass necklaces, but the fashion did not catch on," the culture secretary said.
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