Ippei
Ippei is a contemporary craft artist working in glass, completing a BA (Hons) in Craft and Material Practices at Arts University Plymouth. His work sits between craft and sculpture.
He takes mass-produced objects (toys, pop culture figures, everyday things) and casts them in glass using pâte de verre. The shape stays the same. The material changes everything. What was disposable becomes fragile and permanent at once. Each cast object is then sealed inside a faceted sphere, where angles refract and fragment what is held inside. You can see the object, but never clearly.
He calls this Future Archaeology: not preserving the past, but building something that will one day be found. The question running through all of his work is simple: what does our culture decide to keep, and what does it throw away?