A Moment of Crystallisation
Omer Arbel in his studio in Vancouver.
As the pixelated image sharpens into view, a smiling Omer Arbel condenses onto my screen, framed by some steeply sloping white wooden rafters. I imagine the rest of this loft might be a sleek converted workspace, a cosy cubbyhole perched, perhaps, above a roaring hot and dimly-lit workshop where glowing metal and glass flow freely.
We are separated in both space and time – I can see cold morning light diffusing through a skylight in Arbel’s Vancouver HQ, while myown windows are smothered by curtains on this drizzly London evening. Yet despite the distance, I find that I easily fall in step with Arbel’s effusive and easy-going conversational style, as he introduces me to the works we have planned to discuss today.
They are anonymously numbered 19, 28, 76, 84, 93 and 113 – the title schema a hallmark of Bocci, the design company that Arbel co-founded in 2005. But this sequential ordering is misleading, he tells me. “I’m trying to create an ambient cloud of ideas rather than a linear narrative,” he says, waving his hands above his head. “I’d like you to focus on the intuitive understanding of the two materials, rather than the sequence.”
The 76 introduces a vacuum to a strata of hot white and clear glass with copper mesh between the two. The vacuum pulls the white glass through the mesh, leaving tendrils of it suspended inside the clear glass.
These two materials are copper and glass, although Arbel’s full body of work is by no means limited to this pairing. For 20 years it has spanned colourful resins, metals, concrete, woods, porcelain, polymers, plants and lighting across the fields of architecture, sculpture, invention and design.
“Many of the connections between the projects are very tangential and occur as a consequence of coincidence,” he says of the particular material studies that have occupied his attention recently. Sharing his screen, the words “copper” and “glass” appear on a black background, with a heart in between them. “I’ve obtained a degree of intimacy with both these materials,” he says.
The text is replaced by flames licking the circumference of a dark, squat cylinder: work 19. “It introduces our approach, which is to invent a process, not a form,” he says. The process in question is sandcasting copper alloy to create a highly-polished circular vessel, which glows from the centre of a coarse, chaotic halo that is itself formed by the blackened, oxidised copper allowed to overspill from the mould. “I like to think of this as the purest thing I’ve ever done because my only decision has been to determine the diameter of the circle,” he says. “And even that was governed by the flow rate of copper at different temperatures.”
The next work, 28, describes Arbel’s early experimentation with glassblowing – manipulating glass with heat to tune its malleability in selected parts of a vessel, while also creating a vacuum to subsume these hot regions, in what he describes as a “controlled implosion”. Contrasting forms are produced when a hot dollop of coloured glass is sucked inwards in this way, and the results are illuminated and hung in clusters to create a bubbly multi-layered effect. “When I first discovered this process,I thought I’d invented something completely novel, but it turns out that this is a common method in glassblowing,” he admits with a self- deprecating chuckle.
84.3 is a series of scans taken after slicing through 84.2 vases, a design that suspends a bubble of coloured glass within a copper mesh basket that is dipped into hot clear glass.
These individual material studies come together in 76 and 84, the first confluence of the two materials in Arbel’s work. Drawing on the idea of coaxing hot glass with a vacuum, 76 sees white glass sucked through a fine copper mesh to form spindly tendrils, all of which are trapped in a transparent glass bubble. The 84 is the same, except the air pressure is paused before the tendrils form, so that coloured glass deliciously bulges through the grid-like mesh. The finished pieces form vases and lighting arrangements, the light glinting off the intricate protuberances inside. Crucially, these experiments proved that glass and copper could be safely worked together; that their coefficients of expansion (the extent to which a material expands when it is heated) could be well-matched.
But what if copper could be melted into a glass vessel? asks project 93. “There’s a molecular bond that occurs when they’re both hot,” Arbel tells me. “The glass-facing copper doesn’t oxidise, but the inward-facing copper molecules do, and so you get the same elephant-skin, dark black, charcoal texture that I loved with 19.” The chaotic dribbling of yellow-hot copper down the inside surfaces of the vessel produces a completely unique piece each time. “You couldn’t match them even if you tried!”
The 84.2 vase being produced at Bocci.
The finale of the series to date is 113. “Every strong trajectory must lead to its opposite,” he grins. “For years I’d been trying to match the two coefficients of expansion and explore consequences of that on a formal or aesthetic level. Now, I wondered, what if I deliberately tried to do the opposite?” The pieces start out the same as the 93s, except this time when the materials cool, they shrink in a catastrophically mis-matched way. The consequence is the shattering of the glass layer, explains Arbel. “The materials reject each other and what you’re left with are these copper shadows of the glass form.”
With the echoes of the pinging, clinking and twanging of shattering 113s still resonating in my ears, my inner materials scientist can’t wait to quiz Arbel more about these works. I started by asking him about the drama of these processes.
Anna Ploszajski One theme that I picked up in your work was the timescales involved in its processes, because when copper and glass become hot they have very different timescales. When you’re casting copper it’s all quite urgent – you need to get it out of the furnace and into your sand-cast mould, or get it into a form really quickly before it cools down.Whereas when you work with glass, it’s much slower and more sensual. It can be quite dramatic if it heats too much and then starts flopping everywhere, but it’s a slower rate of movement. How do you manage to control both of those things when you work with the materials together?
Omer Arbel That’s an insight for me. I hadn’t actually considered it before, but you’re right – there is a completely different order of magnitude of urgency. I guess the only pieces that require a calibration or a moment of meeting are 93 and 113. The act of pouring is a punctuated moment in an otherwise drawn-out process, which is quite a beautiful way of thinking about it. In the studio, there’s a kind of slow build up as the glasswork is being made patiently, with sensitivity. And then, when the moment’s right, everything happens all at once. The copper gets poured, the glass shatters, it’s quite dramatic. We just love it. There’s a performative aspect to the work that, as time goes by, I celebrate more and more. At first, I regarded it as just an obvious consequence of the process. I didn’t realise that the performance of the procedure is actually an almost sacred aspect of this piece. If I’m the composer and I create a score, then the glassblowers and the metal casters are the musicians – it’s such a beautiful collaboration because they bring so much of themselves into the work. Imagine how a different musician might perform the same work; the same notes, but a completely different emotional backdrop.
113 sees a copper alloy poured into a blown glass shape. As the piece cools, the glass shatters, leaving a copper shadow of itself.
Anna As well as that, you’ve got the physical materials, which would be instruments in your analogy. The way that those materials will flow is completely unique. It’s not quite random because it’s guided by the shape and temperature and so on, but it’s not 100 per cent controllable where that copper will flow or how the glass will be led by the vacuum.
Omer If I establish a criteria, I say, “Okay, what’s important is that there are no mistakes. Every single thing we make is interesting as long as it follows these particular loose guidelines.” That’s a very abstract idea and then there’s the moment where that abstraction becomes a very particular object – that’s what I meant when I use the word “sacred”. It seems very important to me that, in its concept, the piece could be any number of forms. An infinite number of possibilities is present in the glass shop every time one of these things begins its making process, and then it transforms into a highly specific and particular object that can never be repeated. That is actually true about everything in our world when you think about it. Even things that appear identical are not – we just can’t perceive the differences.
Anna That’s sort of quantum mechanics – Schrödinger’s cat. There’s an infinite number of possibilities, but then you open the books, or you cast the copper, or you blow the glass, or whatever, and it crystallises into its final form. There’s a funny mirroring of art and science.
Omer I speak about Schrödinger’s box a lot. I just described it to my daughter the other day, although I had to invent something else because she didn’t like the idea of a dead cat. It is a mystifying concept in a very basic way, which we can celebrate as humans. We can be present for that moment of the collapse of the wave function, and we know from quantum mechanics that observation effects that moment of crystallisation into a specific object. It is all quite alluring to me.
The 93 melts copper into a glass bulb, with the glass-facing copper retaining its orange colour because it does not oxidise, while the interior side turns to charcoal tones.
Anna It’s interesting that even if there’s an accident in your workshop, it’s treated as something to be looked at and thought about, because that’s exactly what scientists do in their labs. There is no null result, because if there’s an accident or something goes differently, then maybe that could be a new avenue of research. We actually saw that with the coronavirus vaccine trial in the UK, where they accidentally gave one cohort of patients the wrong dosage, but it turned out to be the best combination. It’s always worth going down those avenues. As scientists, we are often so reluctant to publish a negative result or an accident. We don’t like to say, “Oh, I didn’t mean for it to go like that.” It sounds like you don’t think the same way.
Omer I’ve said in past interviews that failure is my constant companion, but I want to change that now because it’s not failure. Even the word “failure” is the wrong word. There are no edits, in a sense, in any of our work. Even ideas that have never come to light remain in the studio on the shelf until they do come to light, and sometimes that takes years. That’s why we have them around all the time – to be able to see them as we’re walking through or doing something else. You never know when it’s going to click, be it through a new piece of equipment, or a new person with a different skillset who comes into your orbit, or a different context. Something changes, and these past “failures” breathe a new life. So, it’s not only true that within each project we accept every single iteration of the procedure as valid, it’s also within the practice as a whole. There are no bad ideas. They’re just not ready yet.
Anna Or they haven’t been combined with the right idea.
The 76.
Omer Exactly, or the right person, or the right leap in terms of material knowledge. That’s another reason why I feel more and more comfortable with the numbering system that I established quite a long time ago, because it gives an equivalence to every idea. Not a single one of them is better than the others. It also implies that none of them end, you just keep going.
Anna Let’s talk about this specific combination of materials, because copper and glass are very different personalities in material science. One is a metal that goes through a crystallisation process such that at one temperature it’s a liquid, and then you lower it by 1°C and suddenly it’s a solid. Whereas, glass is weird. Is it a liquid? Is it a solid? It goes through a strange morphing transition over hundreds of degrees before it goes from a solid-y type thing to a more liquid-y type thing. Even those processes of heating and cooling manifest so differently in these two materials. I’m interested in how you manage to wrangle them together.
Omer A huge amount of the craft of glassblowing is exactly that – on an intuitive level understanding the amount of heat in the glass, knowing exactly when to reheat it, and having a perception of how much heat is in different parts of the object. The part that attaches to the punty, which is the metal rod or blowpipe that you use to insert air, is always hotter than the extreme end of the glass because the metal absorbs more heat. And the thicker parts of the glass absorb more heat than the thin. There’s this balancing act that every glassblower performs which is almost completely intuitive. It’s the way that ballet dancers perform without actually knowing what their body is doing. So, on that level I rely entirely on the intuition of the glassblowers for the work with glass. For copper, as you say, it has a brute force aspect to it. In one minute it goes solid, so there we just heat it and hope for the best. It spills everywhere like water and then immediately solidifies. That’s the other thing: copper flows freely when it’s hot, literally like water, while glass is kind of syrupy. It has the consistency of honey, with this slower, more meandering quality, whereas copper is very direct. The interesting thing that’s happened in our glass shop is that the glassblowers have started to incorporate that intuitive quality to working with copper. You alluded to that moment where there’s too much heat in the glass and it starts to flop over – that sometimes happens at the moment where it comes into contact with copper, because there’s so much heat that passes from the copper into the glass, which liquefies immediately. For these particular pieces, that’s the moment where we have to watch out, but it’s actually a direction I’d like to explore and introduce in future work.
19 uses sandcasting to produce “overspill”, a byproduct of the process that is usually removed, but which Arbel instead preserves as a record of the piece’s unique production.
Anna Could you get the copper to burn through the glass or melt it completely away?
Omer Yeah, and what kind of form might that result in? Interestingly, when copper is hot and comes into contact with a liquid like water, there’s almost an explosion that occurs because the water immediately evaporates and pushes outwards if it’s in the centre of the copper. I haven’t been able to do it, but I dream about somehow freezing that explosion as it’s happening – to have a stable object that captures the moment of explosion. We were actually doing some research in a foundry which uses cast iron to make very large machine parts for logging or shipping. They were showing us one particular sand mould, which was probably 1.5m in every direction, and they highlighted a particular “failed” casting where a mouse had been stuck inside the mould.
Anna Oh my God.
Omer Right. When they were flooding it, the mouse was completely evaporated and an explosion occurred. Luckily they were safe because there was a good 200mm of sand cover all the way around, but the form of that explosion was captured in that sand.We haven’t been able to replicate that effect, but I would like glass to take the place of sand in that set of parameters.
Anna I guess you’d need to choose a different liquid to water; something that was going to evaporate but then freeze really quickly. Copper and glass have matching coefficients of thermal expansion, but are you interested in exploring any other types of material property, matching or mismatching?
The 28 blown glass pendant, suspended on copper tendrils. The piece is created by manipulating the temperature and direction of airflow into blown glass.
Omer I’ve been trying to explore how glass will fuse with objects that have a different coefficient of expansion as well – it’s just a question of how stable those fusions remain as the piece cools. That’s exciting because there’s a tremendous variety of iridescent colours that are possible with different metals and different kind of inclusions. There’s one trajectory in the practice where we make what I call “soup”. The obvious one that we’ve tried is a copper/glass soup, which is around 35 per cent copper, 65 per cent glass. We just mix them and see what happens. With that soup, there was a blue-green quality as it fused, but I’d like to go further. I’ve started throwing different kinds of metal in with the copper to make alloys. So you rely on the copper to marry with the glass, but you also get these weird inclusions that make beautiful colours or strange forms. That’s interesting. I’m also fascinated by electricity and am working with that as a way of fusing glass and metal through the heat it generates. The form is so beautiful because it follows the electrical current. These are just ambient experiments – none are conclusive yet.
Anna One of the things I was wondering about is the brittle-ductile transition. It’s basically what we were saying about glass – how it starts as a brittle solid and then, as you heat it, it becomes a viscous liquid. Solid copper doesn’t have that, although some metals, like steel, do. Steel is quite ductile at room temperature, but if you cool it down to freezing temperatures, it goes brittle. I’ve read articles about how that could have been one of the reasons why the Titanic sank, because the steel was too cold and so literally smashed like glass when it hit the iceberg. Copper doesn’t suffer from this, so I’m interested in how that material’s stability, its ductility, can remain despite temperature changes, whereas the glass is a lot more shape-shifting.
Omer That takes us to the process of annealing [a heat treatment that increases a material’s ductility, making it more workable, ed.]. Copper wouldn’t need to be annealed, whereas glass absolutely does.
Anna You can still cold work copper a bit – if you were to work a copper bar back and forth, it would start to become a bit more brittle as a result. So if you annealed it, it would soften again, but it wouldn’t be as catastrophic as glass needing annealing.
The 113 being created in Bocci’s Vancouver glass shop.
Omer Annealing is another super fruitful avenue. If you take glass and cool it down very slowly, what happens on a molecular level is that the tensions built up in the glass are released over time instead of all at once, so that the piece doesn’t shatter. That’s how we overcome that inherent brittleness of glass. Copper doesn’t need that. But I guess when I look at those two works, 93 and 113, that’s actually what we’re relying on. The discrepancy between those two materials and the way in which they behave is what we’re relying on. In the case of 113 it’s easy, because we just let the materials do their thing, but for 93 there’s a process of annealing that takes days because we’re trying to bring the cooling of the two materials to a sweet spot where they can occur together. There, the malleability of the copper is our best friend because the glass moves quite a bit. But one reason I wanted to talk about copper and glass is because I feel like there’s a long way to go with it. For the first 15 years of our practice, my trajectory has been to invent processes. I invent a process, the process iterates, and every iteration is unique. The process occurs at many scales – at the scale of an object, a piece of sculpture or installation, a component of a building or even an entire building – and that’s been very satisfying, but there is a kind of laboratory aspect to this trajectory which limits the poetic potential of the work. There is still a tremendous amount of control that we’re exerting on these pieces, so one way that I’ve thought about imbuing meaning in the works beyond the performative moment of the universal turning into the particular, is to apply this way of thinking to natural phenomena. The one that I’m focusing on now is lightning. The idea is to pass an electrical current through a canister of glass dust with the metal inclusions that we’ve learned about over the years. But the source of that electrical current would come from a bolt of lightning. That’s quite far-fetched from a safety perspective, but it could produce fulgurites, which is where lightning strikes silica and makes forms that correspond to the path of the electrical current. What I would like is that these objects have a correspondence to actual natural phenomena. This would be a physical embodiment of a particular lightning bolt you see flashing in the sky; the particular amount of energy in that lightning bolt and its path through a sand matrix. It’s poetic in a different way to my other objects because it corresponds to something that actually occurred in “nature”. But the resources required to do it are much greater and, in this particular case, it’s dangerous. We’re outside of our own little playground, but it’s a direction I’d like to pursue. I believe that the meaning of those objects could be a lot more layered and nuanced, and maybe emotional, if they used natural phenomena as their impetus.
Interview Anna Ploszajski
Photographs Fahim Kassam and Bocci
This article was originally published in Disegno #28. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop