As part of its Artist Residencies program, the Fondation d'entreprise Hermès has been inviting artists to access exceptional know-how in its factories since 2010.

Cristallerie Saint-Louis has welcomed eight designers in recent years. First of all invited to an immersion of several weeks alongside the artisans to understand the extremely specific universe of the crystal, each of them could then imagine a singular project, born from the encounter between his own practice and the demanding techniques of the master glassmakers.
The exhibition «Hot Sands», presented at La Grande Place, Musée du cristal Saint-Louis, brings together works made in this new context for artists. The geographical location of the Cristallerie, surrounded by hills and the first forests of the Vosges, just as the unique atmosphere that reigns in the workshops around the fire contribute to creating a world apart where creators allow themselves new avenues of artistic exploration.
The result of many experiments on the material itself, its innumerable possibilities, its vocabulary, but also on its limits, the works imagined by the artists speak to us of their own obsessions. These are the mysteries of time (Atsunobu Kohira), the different states of light (DH McNabb), art history (Emmanuel Régent), ecology and science fiction (Guillaume Dénervaud), matter and space (Lucia Bru), a body in defense (Marie-Anne Franqueville), of the perception and materialization of sounds (Oliver Beer) or of a geological history of matter (Olivier Sévère).
As grains of imagination become these «hot sands», the works presented in this exhibition required a significant time of conception and elaboration until reaching their final form, the exact encounter between those who command matter and those who transfigure it.