The glass menagerie

Klove is a new brand name in the artistic use of glass.

When Klove held its second major glass exhibition at India Habitat Centre, New Delhi, it transported the venue's Visual Arts Gallery into a botanical garden.

Spectators walked on a bed of fresh green grass, gaped at tall palm trees and craned their necks to look at the branches hung on some of the gallery's light fixtures.

In the midst of this were intelligently installed glass pieces that drew the audience's attention. Tall stems in hand-blown glass, a steel screen complete with clusters of tulips done in glass, perfectly curved lotuses balancing delicately on tall tubes.

The piece de resistance: a 12-feet-tall tree with protruding branches (300 hand-blown glass tubes of different sizes were assembled together to complete this work of art) priced at Rs 3.5 lakh.

Unlike "Through the Looking Glass "" Art Glass Sambandh," another glass exhibition in which 19 artists from New Delhi and Sweden presented their work together recently, where light played a fairly important role in emphasising glass art, Klove's glass pieces were deliberately pushed in the background to help audiences experience the entire character of the exhibition.

That's what artist Prateek Jain explains while we settle down in Klove's charming studio that opened just two months ago. The studio houses select pieces of furniture ("we've only recently started designing our own line"), ceramics ("this is outsourced"), brass bowls with embroidery ("this is our new experiment and we'll even do ikat patterns") and a wonderful selection of glass has been lined on shelves.

The stark white walls only serve to highlight the pastel colours of glass, all of it hand blown by Jain and his business partner, Gautam Seth.

"All our glass work is blended in two-carat gold that helps to sustain the colour of the glass pieces for a long time and gives them a unique rainbow hue," explains Seth.

There are wonderful experiments done in bottles (some of which have intricate design), bowls, pearl-drop vases, tubes, and of course, some of the pieces from the recent exhibition have also been bought back. There's a piece in matte finished, plain white glass called "Stalactite and stalagmite" with curved hand-blown glass tubes straightening upwards with another set of curved pieces bowing down to complete the art work.

If their first exhibition held last year at IHC (which even fetched them the best design award) concentrated on smaller pieces and utility-based products with hand-crafted glass in conjunction with stone and wood, this year the duo made sure that works of art emerged from glass.

And they succeeded to a large degree but not without inviting criticism too. There were some who felt that there was too much of the same thing showcased at the exhibition: too many tubes and too many cylindrical cones. Then there was the issue of not using lights correctly to highlight the pieces.

"We wanted to concentrate on the overall look of the exhibition. The theme for our work was a botanical garden. Keeping this in mind, we couldn't have done anything too differently," says Seth.

Sons of businessmen, Jain and Seth had been family friends who helped their respective fathers in the construction business but decided later to work in glass. Two years ago they started learning and experimenting in glass. "We used to get sentimental about any piece that broke. With time, we've understood that's not to be," says Seth.

Today, the duo supplies some of the work to select lifestyle stores in the major metros while some of their work can also be seen in hotels like The Park, Chennai. Of course there are heavy expansion plans on the anvil. For one, their studio will get bigger.

Besides, the duo have also extended their repertoire to office space design and are in the process of doing work for two industrial office spaces where of course, some of their glass will be displayed too.

For now, their future is in glass.