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Alchemy Glass & Light’s glass-fusion process creates bath sinks bearing vivid, one-of-a-kind color patterns.
By Matthew Hall
During the past dozen years, Steve Weinstock and his team of craftsmen at Los Angeles-based Alchemy Glass & Light (AG&L) have produced roughly 12,000 kaleidoscope-colored glass sinks for commercial and residential installations. But each of those sinks is unique, thanks to the proprietary glass-fusion technique the company uses to create them.
AG&L fabricates its "Art for the Bath" sink line--along with its lighting fixtures, bordered mirrors and countertops--via a heating and annealing process that involves interspersing precious minerals and metals within layers of fused glass that's been heated in a kiln to between 1,200 and 1,450 degrees Fahrenheit. "When the glass is placed in the kiln, and the minerals and metals are placed on the glass, the color and pattern that will result are not yet apparent," explains Weinstock. "Though the placement affects the result, nature ultimately decides the fixture's final apperance, which means that no two are alike."
Not surprisingly, the sinks' price tag reflects their custom character: They cost from $1,300 to $5,000 apiece, with most priced in the mid-$2,000s.
AG&L's latest product line is the Celestial Series of sinks, which features patterns suggesting such outer-space phenomena as shooting stars and meteorite showers. Like many an artistic endeavor, this one started as
a fortuitous mishap.
"I had accidentally broken a piece of glass," says Weinstock, "and in looking at the shards, was inspired to incorporate the different fragments into this new design with heavenly overtones."
In the Q&A that follows, Weinstock touches on how he made the leap from holography to hand-crafted sinks, what inspires him and who shouldn't buy his company's products.
How did you get into this line of work?
Surprisingly enough, I was in electrical engineering before I made art my career. During the late 1980s and early '90s, I created a series of brightly colored, often graphic-based holograms as art pieces. I adapted an existing holographic process and simplified it to a point at which I could produce intense color-mixing and dimensional graphic shadows in space.I would take solid objects and drawings on glass or plastic and place them into the holographic volume, which I then would record as a visual "soup" of light and color.
How did that lead to the formation of AG&L?