SOUCHE

A breath, an imprint, a landscape…

Conceived and created by designer Matali Crasset and glass artist Vincent Breed, «Souche» is the unpredictable result of a mass of molten glass blown into the hollow of a tree stump.
The vitreous material was embedded in the dead wood by burning it, and froze. It takes shape and becomes an imprint. Just as the stump is the memory of the vanished tree, the glass that takes its mark there reveals all the residual strength and energy of the plant.
The work is a metaphor for the breath that brings new life.

This tree, thought to be well and truly decimated, gives us a view of a landscape we’ve never seen before, but one that is instantly recognisable: a mountainous landscape, with its peaks and valleys, its trees with their green reflections in a forest setting.
The change of scale is spectacular. It has the effect of a fractal object: the imprint is the forest. The glass, set into the stump, reveals an unsuspected world through a magnifying glass effect.
It plunges us into the heart of the wood, into its veins, into what makes up its structure, into the memory of plant life.