Seven Excerpts About Seven Mirrors
A close up of Front’s Water Reflection Table, the earliest form of mirror dealt with in the studio’s Seven Stories About Mirrors collection and exhibition for Galerie Kreo.
“I’ve given Evi two tips for her article,” my boyfriend’s dad tells him, gesticulating wildly with his fingers. “One. She should use the verb ‘reflect’ as much as possible,” (the “much” is bordering on a shout). “And Two. Sleeping Beauty.”
“I think it’s Snow White?”
“No, no, it’s definitely Sleeping Beauty.”
It’s Snow White (of “mirror, mirror on the wall” fame, if you weren’t following). Even without the rebuttal, this advice isn’t met with universal approval.
“No, no, no,” retorts my boyfriend, “what she needs to do is start it with something like...” he pauses, gazing into the distance, “...‘I finish typing on my phone, turn it to lock screen, and see myself staring back: a black mirror.’” He finishes with a dramatic flourish of the hand.
“It’s a rare opportunity to work with as great a gallery as Kreo. To properly research, and work at the highest level with each craftsperson, takes a long, long time.”
Honestly, I wasn’t thinking of either of these opening lines, not that my opinion mattered much at that point. Reflecting[1] on the significance of mirrors in my life, the thing I can’t get away from is not really about mirrors – the object – at all. I’m mostly worried about how many times I fix my hair on a video call. My family have had the good grace to complain about it. “Stop fiddling with your hair!” my mum interrupts exasperatedly three pandemic family calls in. Work, if they have noticed it, are too polite to say anything (at least not to my face). But I can’t help it. It’s disconcerting spending a year constantly confronted with how you look for such extended periods of time. Noticing how I react to my friends’ stories; then changing how I react to those stories (does my nose really do that when I laugh?); even adjusting my screen to alter the lighting, and seeing how instantly I can transform my face from healthy glow to withered crone.[2] These platforms were built, it seems, around the collective design decision that we might want to have conversations sat side by side with one another, staring at a large, glass mirror. It’s like having a conference call at the hairdresser’s.
To moan about the ubiquity and negative impact of seeing ourselves is, like most contemporary gripes, a modern luxury. There was a time when mirrors were precious, mystical, religious and powerful. They are an object that, once noticed, anybody with an interest in design should love: simple, endlessly useful, redolent of our everyday lives, but with a rich material and craft history. Mirrors have played a role throughout history in art, science, craft and industrialisation, with the object continuously reinvented as a vehicle for new forms of material and cultural expression. Or this, at any rate, is what the Swedish design studio Front tell me when I meet them (online, of course) one summer morning.
“Throughout history, the development of mirrors has always been a high-tech process.”
Front’s Sofia Lagerkvist and Anna Lindgren have just completed a new exhibition and collection for Galerie Kreo in Paris: Seven Stories About Mirrors (2021). It’s a culmination of almost five years of research supported by Kreo, with whom the studio has worked since 2007, although the duo has never previously produced a solo show for the gallery. “It’s a rare opportunity to work with as great a gallery as Kreo,” says Lagerkvist, who pays tribute to founders Clémence and Didier Krzentowski’s willingness to support experimental forms of design practice. “To properly research, and work at the highest level with each craftsperson, takes a long, long time.”
Front, however, did not initially know that they would settle upon mirrors as their area of research. “We were interested in finding one typology of objects and then thoroughly researching its background, trying to understand how it changes with time and according to the culture it’s in,” explains Lagerkvist. When they started looking at mirrors, it seemed the obvious choice. “It’s all there,” says Lagerkvist. “The strong symbolism, but also the fact that the typology has changed so much in its materiality throughout history.” Their research into this history, Lagerkvist explains, “is perhaps not the way a scientist or a historian would explore the same subject, but it is the way that we as designers look at and understand it.”
The show is set out chronologically and materially, with each piece representing a historic shift in the way in which mirrors have been made. To inform their work, Front relied on museums, archives and galleries, but the studio also collaborated with a number of different craftspeople – from bell makers to Venetian glassblowers – to create the collection’s seven pieces. “Even though mirrors are now very common, there’s still a lot of craftsmanship around them,” Lindgren points out, highlighting that this lineage of craft provides a route into understanding the gradual industrialisation of mirrors. “Throughout history,” Lindgren adds, “the development of mirrors has always been a high-tech process.”
The Water Reflection Table.
Water Reflection Table
“A water mirror was a very inconvenient object,” says Lagerkvist. “You had to lie down and you then only saw yourself in what was almost your own shadow – water has quite poor reflectivity, so the picture is very faint.” This low reflectivity is why the momentary glimpse that you might catch in a puddle seems so dark, its colours thin looking – it is only a phantom version of yourself, peering back.
For a collection focused on the materiality and history of mirrors, Seven Stories About Mirrors cheats from the off – its first piece, Water Reflection Table, is definitely not water. From the side, its translucent tabletop looks like chubby resin floating atop a glossy, black pedestal. Look closer, however, and you could imagine that someone has prised a frozen puddle from the earth, placing it on display in a Parisian gallery.
That’s actually not far from the truth: the shape of the table is 3D-scanned from a puddle that Front found in a forest, with this scan subsequently transformed into a mould. Molten glass was then poured in and cast, “to make a simple lake of water,” Lagerkvist says. “We were very happy to see that the surface tension of the glass created a water-like puddle, with faint ripples,” she adds. “In a natural environment, water is rarely completely still: this was a symbol of that.”
“For most of history, the mirror has been such a rare object. People might have only ever seen a mirror once in their lifetime and thought it was some kind of a religious phenomenon, an unearthly object.”
The Water Reflection Table combines the most ancient form of reflection with the heaviest use of digital technology employed by any of the pieces in the show: the ancient and natural, saddled to a distinctly 21st- century digital technology, thereby uniting the huge swathe of design history that Front wish to explore via the mirror form. “For most of history, the mirror has been such a rare object,” muses Lagerkvist, “People might have only ever seen a mirror once in their lifetime and thought it was some kind of a religious phenomenon, an unearthly object.” Indeed, water mirrors have a number of pagan and magical associations. European scryers in the early Middle Ages gazed into still bowls of water, oil or ink (and sometimes the shiny livers of animals) to try and predict the future from the dark reflections they saw. Meanwhile, the star mirrors of Machu Picchu were used for scientific endeavours – flat, shallow stone basins can be found on the hilltop citadel, collecting thin films of water that were historically used for astronomical observation.
The decision to replace water with glass – as opposed to plastic or resin, which would have been easier to work with – tells a deeper story. For much of the mirror’s history, glass has been the form’s material of choice. Yet the initial move towards the use of glass, and its subsequent refinement, was a defining material leap forward. It is fitting, then, that the concept of the water mirror should be captured as a pool of glass –a material innovation solidifying those first reflections.
The Obsidian Mirror.
Obsidian Mirror
“The archaeologist told us how, when they looked into this old mirror for the first time, they could still see some reflection in the surface,” Lagerkvist tells me. “They could see themselves in a mirror that somebody would have looked at themselves in 8,000 years ago.”
While the Water Reflection Table was thickly poured from molten glass, its chronological successor was formed from a flow of fierce, liquid rock. Obsidian is a dark, dense volcanic glass, created when lava cools rapidly. Front’s experiment with the material is closely modelled on the oldest stone mirror yet discovered: an obsidian mirror unearthed at the Neolithic archaeological dig site at Çatalhöyük, Anatolia (modern-day Turkey), which has been recognised as a Unesco World Heritage Site. In the site’s Unesco nomination, its backers cited the significance of the highly polished obsidian mirrors discovered there: “The fact that the number of mirrors found is small and that some of them were used as grave goods, suggests that these objects were much prized, and further indicates that in certain forms and contexts obsidian could enjoy a highly symbolic role, alongside its utilitarianism.” The Çatalhöyük’ mirrors are not only the earliest mirror objects yet found, but also evidence that these were items of cultural value, not just tools.
These Neolithic objects proved ripe territory for Front, who based the shape and form of their Obsidian Mirror on the archaeologists’ drawings. “We have always been fascinated by these small drawings that archaeologists make when they find an object, which are part of their method to describe or simplify the objects in different ways,” Lagerkvist tells me. Front subsequently worked with two stone masons to create a replica of the Çatalhöyük stone mirror, sourcing the obsidian from the same region and mimicking the ancient crafting techniques. “It was made manually – chiselled with another rock,” Lagerkvist tells me.Like its Neolithic counterpart, the Kreo mirror was polished by hand to create its inky, flat face.
“We wanted to keep it to the same exact size as the original mirror. We thought that was very beautiful - to experience how small the image was that you saw yourself in 8,000 years ago.”
For all the glamour of its glossy, black surface, the Obsidian Mirror is diminutive – small enough to cup in your hand. Front worked with a silversmith to create a setting for the stone, which was designed to enhance the colour of the obsidian and the irregularity of its sides. “For us, this stone was symbolic of the journey that [the mirror] has gone on,” says Lagerkvist. “From very dark materials, slowly transforming into lighter and lighter ones. Of course, people were trying to get as light and accurate a reflection as possible, but it was the black stone that actually made the strongest reflection. It’s a bit like when you look at your iPhone and you see yourself in is black surface.”
This tension between the contemporary and the historical is suggested in the way in which Front’s research is presented. “We want to create contemporary objects where you don’t necessarily need to know the history to be able to appreciate them,” says Lindgren. Yet key design choices still anchor Front’s objects to that history. “We wanted to keep it to the same exact size as the original mirror,” says Lindgren. “We thought that was very beautiful - to experience how small the image was that you saw yourself in 8,000 years ago.”
The Bronze Mirror.
Bronze Mirror
The Bronze Mirror is the most decorative piece in Front’s collection. While its amber colouration hints at its material inspiration, the mirror is actually made from glass, held within a cast-bronze rim that is suspended from an intricate, handmade rope.
Although earlier iterations of metal mirrors, chiefly copper, have been found in Egypt and Iran, the next piece in Front’s collection is inspired by the small bronze mirrors that were made in China from around 2,000BCE. These mirrors had a reflective bronze surface, and were hung from a ribbon or silk cord that attached to the clothes of those wealthy enough to afford them. Their backs were highly ornate and often imbued with meaning, decorated with flowers, plants, dragons, or phoenixes, as well as inscriptions by the maker, which frequently indicated the objects’ links to spirituality. “If you carry this mirror, you will see great divinities,” reads one, highlighted by Mark Pendergrast in his book Mirror Mirror: A History Of The Human Love Affair With Reflection. Others had links to love and religion. “They made mirrors that broke into two parts,” Lagerkvist explains. “You gave one part to a loved one, such that you would be buried with a part each. It was like a portal – they would know that they could move into the next world together.” Less profoundly, but of no less interest to a history of design and manufacturing, some of these mirrors also exhibited examples of early marketing. “Mr Tu has made a precious and marvellous mirror,” Pendergrast reports reading on one mirror’s inscription. “[There] has never been such a one in the world.”
“They’re still in the same place, doing the same kinds of work using very similar techniques to those that they were using at the start. We feel like bronze has a story to tell about the continuation of any type of technique that relies on people passing knowledge down about how we make things.”
Bronze mirrors were, however, high maintenance. The soft surface scratched easily and had to be polished daily. “Each of the types of mirror [in the show] have reasons why they were continually developed [after they were made],” Lagerkvist notes. “They were not perfect. It was almost impossible to make these metal mirrors completely flat, for instance.” As such, bronze mirrors were often slightly dented or imperfect, producing a distorted image. Indeed, although Chinese bronze mirrors were sophisticated materialisations of cultural and economic value, metal mirrors have traditionally been seen as technically inferior to their glass counterparts. “We haven’t found many people actually still making metal mirrors because the reflection is not perfect,” says Lagerkvist, who nevertheless notes that the form does continue to exist in a particular context. “Of course, you can still buy metal mirrors – in an area like a public bathroom, you might have a metal mirror instead of a glass one.” I know the kind she means: fuzzy, scratched panels in the sadder type of service station bathroom, graced with scraps of spikey graffiti and a lingering aroma of urine. Places where breakable glass is not to be trusted.
Lagerkvist explains that a driving aim of the project is to feature “techniques that have some background in craft,” exploring how these skills persist and are passed down throughout history. Bronze, therefore, led Front to the Marinelli Bell Foundry in Agnone, Italy, which made the rim of their mirror. Founded no later than 1339, the foundry has been run by the Marinelli family for just shy of 700 years. “They’re still in the same place, doing the same kinds of work using very similar techniques to those that they were using at the start,” says Lagerkvist. “We feel like bronze has a story to tell about the continuation of any type of technique that relies on people passing knowledge down about how we make things.”
The Convex Mirror Vase.
Convex Mirror Vase
Travel around a mile outside of Venice, over bridges and through lagoons, and you reach the island of Murano, the historical glassmaking capital of Italy.
It’s here where the Barbini family work, mirror makers who “don’t blow glass,” as Lagerkvist clarifies, but are responsible for making the coating that creates the crucial reflective backing for a mirror. The Barbini family produced three pieces for Front’s collection, but it is the Convex Mirror Vase that represents their oldest glass craft tradition. “Around 100 BCE Syrian craftsmen near Sidon discovered that they could dip a long hollow metal tube into a batch of molten glass, retrieve a glob on the end, and blow it into shape,” Pendergrast writes. “Within the well-organised Roman Empire, this revolutionary new method spread quickly.” Pliny the Elder even notes it in his Natural History Book XXXVI: “Sidon was once famous for its glassworks, since, apart from other achievements, glass mirrors were invented there.”
These new glass mirrors were created by coating the inside of glass orbs with hot lead, which could then be broken open and cut down to produce small, slightly domed mirrors used throughout the Roman Empire for cosmetics and toiletries, or else employed as magical amulets. Suddenly, this production method enableda bright, clear reflected image, with the fish-eye distortion caused by the mirror’s curvature deemed preferable to the murky darkness of the metal mirrors of the period. “There has been so much importance placed on different mirror coatings throughout history,” Lagerkvist reflects, “and the importance of not revealing secret recipes, such as putting lead onto the glass in a very specific way, harks all the way back to the Roman era. Throughout history, it’s been a bit of a power play between those who have the knowledge and those who don’t.”
“There has been so much importance placed on different mirror coatings throughout history and the importance of not revealing secret recipes, such as putting lead onto the glass in a very specific way, harks all the way back to the Roman era.”
Front’s convex mirrors have thick, bevelled frames, executed in silver and matte gold, with the small mirror element set in the middle. The studio floats these mirrors above the forms from which they were cut – a pair of enormous orb vases with long, straight necks, and bodies that show the circular cut-outs punctuating their generous circumferences. These parent forms instantly reveal the process of their mirrors’ making, with their silvered shells cut away to reveal vivid, gold interiors. Convex silver, concave gold. “It’s a beautiful contrast to have the convex and the concave mirror in the same piece,” says Lindgren.
Although they provide an imperfect reflection, convex and concave mirrors have, historically, proven useful tools. “People placed convex mirrors behind a lit candle to [help] spread the light, or in theatres to direct light to different areas,” notes Lagerkvist. Even concave mirrors had their uses. In his Natural Questions, Volume I, for example, Seneca memorably – and perhaps a little too vividly – recounts the case of Hostius Quadra, who made use of concave mirrors in order to “take delight in the false size of his partner’s very member”.
The Cut Mirror Vase.
Cut Mirror Vase
Being a glassmaker from Murano in the 14th century came with perks: it was well paid and craftsmen were allowed to marry eligible noblewomen above their station. There was, however, a catch: leaving Murano was illegal, with threats of the death penalty used to keep the craftspeople, and their embodied knowledge, in Venice. In 1291, Venetian authorities had moved the city’s glassmaking industry to the island – both to protect the city from the risk of fires and to reduce the risk of foreign spies gaining trade secrets. “The [craftspeople] were sworn in and that made it possible for them to keep this secret for many hundreds of years,” says Lagerkvist. “And, of course, that really added to the value of the objects.”
“The Murano mirror had a couple of different secrets,” she continues. “First of all, they added a specific ingredient to the glass, so it was clearer than any other glass that had been made until then. Then there was the matter of how they foiled the material on the back, and details of the components within that technique. That all made for very highly sought- after mirrors, which were considered the height of luxury throughout Europe. It became a massive industry in Venice and was a big part of their income.”
“By heating and blowing a large cylinder, glassmakers could cut this form before rolling it out like a reverse Swiss roll to make a true, flat sheet.”
Alongside the desire to make brighter and shinier mirrors, there was an ambition to create sheets of glass (and thus mirrors) that were bigger and flatter. One early method was to blow glass and “make it bubble and then just open it up,” explains Lagerkvist, “which made very big, flat, round sheets of glass. Of course, they have a little point in the middle where they blew [the glass], which created a very uneven part.” It is, Lagerkvist points out, a technique that many will have seen before. “If you see old pub windows, they have this little ‘nipple’ in the middle, which is actually the centre point from this bubble,” she explains. “The sides were cut out and sold as window glass for big grand houses, while the middle parts were the cheaper ones that poorer people could afford.”
Front’s Cut Mirror Vase represents this leap forward in manufacturing. “People were trying many different methods to find a way to make flat glass,” says Lagerkvist. “There’s a technique called broad glass, recorded in 1226 in Surrey, which the Cut Mirror Vase shows”. This method, with slight variations, began to appear concurrently throughout Europe as well. Pendergrast describes how “certainly by the early fifteenth century, glassmakers in Germany, France and Italy learned to blow relatively large cylinders of glass, then open the ends and slit them down the side.” By heating and blowing a large cylinder, glassmakers could cut this form before rolling it out like a reverse Swiss roll to make a true, flat sheet. To demonstrate this method, Front created a mirrored- glass vessel that is caught halfway through the process. The Cut Mirror Vase has been sliced down its middle, then across, like an upside-down T. The top corners of each cut peel away, revealing another iteration of the interior gold foiling seen in the Convex Mirror. The repetition of this foiling technique reveals the involvement of the Barbinis – a nod by Front to the influence and skill of Murano’s craftspeople. The combination of this large-sheet method, coupled with the island’s startling, clear glass and bright coating, allowed Murano to establish a dominance over mirror making that amounted to almost a monopoly – at least until the 1600s.
The Secret Mirror.
The Secret Mirror
In the late 1600s, having escaped Murano, a group of mirrorsmiths were holed up in a secret location outside Paris. It was here where they received letters of desperate entreaty from their wives in Murano. “Oh, you have to come home because they are treating us so badly and we miss you so much,” Lagerkvist paraphrases. “You have to come back and rescue us!” These letters were likely fakes. Keen to preserve their hegemony over glass manufacture, the Venetian authorities intercepted letters to the escaped mirror- makers, Pendergrast notes, before sending “fake replies in which the wives asked their mates to come and fetch them”. These forgeries, however, did not fool the fugitives, Pendergrast explains: “the letters were far too literate.”
The Secret Mirror, of all Front’s objects, is the most conventionally “mirror-like”. It has the most familiar shape – one you might see in a museum or palace, or on the set of one of those period dramas with lots of heaving bosoms. Its central hexagonal mirror is framed by a faceted border, angled up and away from the looking glass so as to resemble a shallow geometric dish. On either side of this are two smaller mirrors: each cut from a copy of the central mirror, and then attached such that the whole thing can open and close like a cabinet. Where these cut sections meet, the light refracts, causing kaleidoscopic glints. This jigsawed design harks back to the techniques of the Murano craftspeople. “It was very tricky to have big pieces of mirror,” explains Lagerkvist. “So they had this very decorative system of using smaller parts of flat mirrors. If something was a bit ugly, they just put a flower on it. It wasn’t just extravagance – it could cover cracks.”
“The idea with the Secret Mirror is that it’s like a closed cabinet, but now it’s open and the secret is out. It’s not possible to close it again.”
The Secret Mirror is multifaceted in both history and shape. “For a long time, Louis XIV tried to make mirrors in France, but was not successful,” explains Lagerkvist. Desperate to rival Venice and create mirrors that would – spoiler alert – eventually culminate in the famous Hall of Mirrors in the palace of Versailles, Louis, “managed to get five people to leave the island [of Murano] and come to France,” Lagerkvist explains. They set up a mirror-making factory in Saint-Gobain, just outside Paris. Perhaps because old habits die hard, perhaps due to a streak of loyalty or simply a sense of economics, these mirrorsmiths still refused to reveal their secrets. “The masters did not let the secret out,” says Lagerkvist. “They became valuable to the French king because they had supplied him with mirrors, but not with the secret.”
The establishment of the Saint-Gobain mirror factory tolled the death knoll for Murano’s stranglehold over mirror making. The sheer scale of production for the French king meant that, inevitably, the secrets of the Murano mirror-makers got out. From here, the craft became more popular and ubiquitous. Glass mirrors remained expensive, but they were now a luxury item that was attainable outside the sphere of royalty and aristocracy. “The idea with the Secret Mirror is that it’s like a closed cabinet, but now it’s open and the secret is out,” says Lindgren. “It’s not possible to close it again.”
One of the Reflection Vases.
Reflection Vases
“We wanted to create an object that talked about the reflection within every object, but also talked about how an object, just like the whole journey of the mirror, reflects its context,” says Lagerkvist. The last pieces in the collection, the Reflection Vases, are tall, smooth vessels, filled with dancing shadows and trapped reflections. Lagerkvist tells me that this mirror has a more philosophical intention than the others. “Very early on, within nature, there weren’t many highly reflective surfaces,” she says. “But today, you can see a reflection in a spoon or... anywhere really. Reflections have become something that we see every day, but we don’t even notice. We wanted to make an object that celebrated the idea of a reflection in a regular object.”
The process that allows you to trap these curved and elongated half glimpses is the Graal technique. Developed in 1916 at Sweden’s Orrefors glass factory by Knut Bergqvist, it is a glassblowing method that traps coloured layers between transparent sheets of glass. Designs may then be etched or sandblasted onto the glass, before the material is reheated and blown into its final shape – sealing the image in. The first pieces credited as using this technique were part of the Swedish art glass movement, and favoured red glass that looked as if it was flowing freely within the vessels. The similarities to blood earned them the name “graal” or “grail”, as in “Holy Grail”.
“Of course, reflection surrounds us everywhere and it affects us. It’s not only just a tool: it’s really reflecting who we are. One’s self image has become more important in society and it’s become everything for many people.”
There is still something of this mysticism in Front’s contemporary piece: the confusion between what is a real reflection and what are ghostly designed images of windows or trees that lack physical counterparts. “We wanted to have [the reflection] ‘inside’ the thickness of the glass,” says Lindgren. “So it’s not on the surface and you have this mix of the real reflection and the reflection built into the glass.” In one image of the vessels, I can see an uncanny layering of trees, grass and hills, mixed up with elements of Galerie Kreo’s space; in another, a number of curved sash windows that I’m almost certain aren’t in the gallery itself but, even so, a slight doubt creeps in. “There have been times when we get confused too,” laughs Lagerkvist.
Although created using a 20th-century technique, the ideas behind the Reflection Vases are strikingly contemporary. They represent: “how an object changes with its surroundings, literally reflecting the room it is placed within, and metaphorically the values of their eras,” Front explain on their website. “Of course, reflection surrounds us everywhere and it affects us,” says Lagerkvist. “It’s not only just a tool: it’s really reflecting who we are. One’s self image has become more important in society and it’s become everything for many people.” I think back to my Zoom self- consciousness with a twinge of recognition.
1 See what I did there?
2 No, you’re exaggerating.
Words Evi Hall
Images Alexandra de Cossette
This article was originally published in Disegno #30. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.