Behind the design: Existential Blossom

In the scorching heart of ancient deserts, beneath skies bleached white with heat, our ancestors witnessed something extraordinary: sand transmuting into a substance that seemed to capture light itself. This moment - when humanity first discovered glass - marked the beginning of our endless fascination with transparency. The Egyptians, those master craftsmen of antiquity, first shaped this miraculous material into symbols of power and privilege, their delicate ornaments catching and splitting desert light into countless scattered stars.

A church window that was sold in an auction in Philadelphia, turned out to be rare Tiffany pieces

Yet it was the Romans who truly revolutionised our relationship with glass. Their innovation of glassblowing transformed this precious substance from mere decoration into something rather more profound. Suddenly, glass wasn't simply something to be admired - it became a lens through which we could perceive our world anew. Windows framed our view of the universe, vessels contained our daily sustenance, and artists discovered an entirely new medium for expressing the ineffable.

As centuries unfurled, glass evolved alongside human consciousness. Medieval craftsmen coaxed it into cathedral windows that transformed sunlight into divine narratives. Renaissance masters used it to capture stories in translucent pigments. Today's artists push their boundaries still further, creating installations that challenge our very perception of space and light. In each era, glass has served as both a mirror and window to our civilisation's aspirations.

Proust, that master observer of human nature, once noted that "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes." Our glass flower embodies this rather profound truth. Unlike its organic counterparts, it carries no earthen fragrance and boasts no natural pigments. Instead, it offers something altogether more ethereal: in the delicate interplay between its crystalline form and ever-shifting light, it reveals a beauty that transcends nature itself - a beauty born of human ingenuity yet somehow touching the infinite.

The inherent fragility of glass serves as a rather poignant metaphor for existence itself. In its transparent depths, we glimpse both permanence and impermanence, presence and absence. While we cannot halt time's relentless march or fully grasp the vast questions of being, we can choose how we perceive these mysteries.

Perhaps that's the true gift of glass: it teaches us to see beyond the visible, to find meaning in the spaces between presence and absence.