Some forms of life emerge despite everything. Others subsist in silence. Still others bend until they conform.

Still Standing stages three plants sculpted in glass. Three states facing constraint. Three human gestures.

Surgo – When the soil no longer nourishes

A fragment of asphalt. Transparent glass rising, leaning, off-balance. Almost no foliage.

Here, the soil has been covered. Sterilized. And yet, something emerges anyway. Not because it was wanted. Despite.

A form of life that persists in an environment not meant for it.

Blown borosilicate glass on Marseille asphalt – H:31cm / W:44cm / D:28cm

Cérasus – When we look away

Concrete, fragmented limestone. A straight plant, but its branches are off-axis. It could have become a bonsai. But it wasn't chosen.

Not interesting enough. Not within the frame. So it grows in silence. Neither uprooted nor cared for. Just ignored.

This violence makes no noise. It lets live, but without regard. An existence in-between.

Blown borosilicate glass on concrete and limestone – H:22cm / W:33cm / D:24cm

Kōshi – When everything fits

Raw limestone. Rich, intact soil. A dense, balanced plant. Foliage white with limestone. Each branch in its place.

It's beautiful. It's harmonious. We look and find it right.

But to get there: extraction, pruning, wiring. Branch by branch, year after year. Everything that deviated was straightened. Everything that resisted was cut.

This is not a tree. It's a plan.

Paradoxically, this may be the most radical violence in the series. Because it's invisible. Because it produces beauty. Because we confuse it with care. Because it requires years of repeated constraints for the form to give up what it could have become.

Blown borosilicate glass on natural limestone – H:25cm / W:40cm / D:18cm

Why glass?

Glass is worked hot, under constraint. It yields, resists, adapts. It retains the trace of the gestures imposed on it.

Like the plant. Like us.

The plant is the subject. Glass is the medium. But perhaps you recognize something else in these constrained forms.