Alissa Volchkova
Alissa Volchkova is a Franco-Russian designer and artist based in Paris. After several years of experience in architecture, she changed the scale of her projects to produce objects. Her work explores the industrial processes of production in a poetic way, revealing their uniqueness, and developing the potential of different materials, with a particular attraction for ceramics and glass.
Alissa Volchkova’s hand carved Crystal Kiddush Cups are part of her investigation into our origins and the gestures behind the very first human creations. Part of a series of Stone Age gobelets, this kiddush glass is a tribute to an era when human identity developed with the first useful tools: stones.
For this project, Alissa Volchkova is using crystal in an unexpected way. Instead of its usual polished surface and light weight, often associated with the ideas of perfection and luxury, the artist is on the contrary looking for a mat, rough and irregular aspect in order to imitate the primitive techniques that humans of the Stone Age era developed, such as carving, breaking, cutting. To do so she had to reconnect with her own instinctive gestures.
The weight and thickness of the glasses is a reminder of the weight of the stones, forcing us to hold them in a more primitive way, rather than with a subtle and careful gesture like we would do with a regular wine glass.
