Blob-Shaped Light Bulbs Look Like They’re Melting
Anyone who has watched the fascinating process of blowing glass knows that there is an art to crafting creative irregular shapes in this strange liquid-turned-solid material. Pieke Bermans combines unique art and custom design, placing his strange bulb designs in even stranger contexts, displaced in time and space.
Somehow at home in their dark, dreary and gray surroundings, these creative blown glass art bulbs have been set against a background of unassuming vintage furniture in an unappealing office. One could almost imagine that this is what real light bulbs would do decades after the end of the world, melting slowly and losing shape over time.
“An installation with a table and a chair can be seen in one of the rooms of the Groninger Museum. An everyday and reassuring scene at first glance. But strange things happen. The otherwise reliable and predictable light bulbs have suddenly taken on alarming proportions. They seem inspired and seem to lead a life of their own in which they have taken possession of the interior in their expanded form. It’s a surreal scene that asks questions about, among other things, the relationship between people and the things they produce. It is precisely this apparent immutability of that self-manufactured environment, made up of artifacts: houses, tables and chairs, etc. that appear the same to us every day, year after year, and which forms a protective shell between ourselves and nature, that seems to us to be such a dynamic existence. to offer some guidance. Without it, philosopher Hannah Arendt adds, everything would be in constant flux and no objectivity would be possible.[1]”
“But what if the dead matter that we have so artfully manipulated turns out not to be so dead? What does it mean for our image of reality if that material world, which seems so stable and constant, turns out to be only a false certainty? It is these ideas that work with the title From the Sky (2011) by designer Pieke Bergmans seems to play with. She worked with craftsmen to blow the glass moulds, perhaps the largest of their kind.”
