Building sites and agricultural areas are typically described by the utilitarian operations that shape them—rugged, harsh, and often back-breaking. They are spaces that resist softness, built quite literally around force and tension. Artist Pia Hinz flips this idea on its head as she explores the conceptual and material relationship between strength and vulnerability.

Living and working between Ardèche, Amsterdam, and Arles, France, Hinz has been working with stained glass for the past three years. She focuses much of her work on objects that one might find in environments of labor, such as construction or farming. Her sculptures take on an array of recognizable forms including hammers, screws, traffic cones, tractor doors, scythes, rope, and more.

By introducing glass, Hinz subverts the practical purpose of tools and machinery as each object emerges antithetical to its original form. “Here, fragility and invincibility intertwine,” says an exhibition statement from La Menuiserie 2, a residency the artist completed in 2024. “By replacing functional materials with fragile ones, the artist questions our relationship to objects, their use value, and their narrative potential.”

As light passes through the artist’s work, it spills across surrounding spaces and results in shifts of color. Pieces like “MON PRÉCIEUX” and “Néon sacré” are elegantly adorned with abstract, geometric patterns that are shaped by winding metal lines. For Hinz, working with the material is, as she describes, an “urge to retrace the relation between light and space.”

The artist is currently working on a permanent stained glass monument for a building in Paris. Find more on Instagram.

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