Green Glass and Leather Pendant Necklace from Brazil, "Forest Layers"

João Alexandre and Silvana met through mutual friends. They developed a friendship and later started dating. Today, they are a couple united and determined to make a living from their art and crafts. Theirs is a marriage of bodies, souls and ideas.

They were born in Rio Grande do Sul, but lived in several Brazilian cities and also abroad, in Italy and Great Britain. Now, are established in Santa Catarina state.

João was always curious and attracted to the possibility of transforming materials into new and different objects. As a child, while vacationing at his grandmother's house, he liked to rummage through the piles of leather scraps from a shoe workshop nearby.

Silvana was inspired by her mother's sketchbooks. She admired the art of drawing and the transformation that a pencil can make on a blank sheet of paper. With this new world appearing before her, she chose to study fine arts. After exploring a variety of artistic languages, she found her expression in fused glass art.

"The glass fusing technique is millenarian and consists of overlapping pieces of glass, then placing them in an oven at 800 degrees until they melt into a single piece. Our raw material is the glass, mostly recycled. In addition, we also use leather, clay, wood and metals to complement our creations. The whole process is handmade, from the glass cutting to the mineral oxide painting, leather cutting and dyeing," she says.

"Our inspiration comes from nature, from beauty, from people, from experience but, above all, from the will to do and live from art. "We like to see the great possibilities of colors and shapes that glass can acquire. It is really fascinating to see the creation of new pieces. Even more fascinating is to add other materials to glass, like leather, as a support for the designs we craft."