Mirrors That Are Designed to Dazzle

In her former life as a dancer with the Paris Opera Ballet, Nathalie Ziegler, 54, came home from performances with her eyes exhausted by the intense stage lights. She got in the habit of lighting her home with nothing but candles, which she placed inside photophores, enclosures that she assembled herself with mosaic-like bits of colored glass.

“All my friends were crazy for them,” Ms. Ziegler said in a video call. “That was the beginning of my love of working with glass.”

After retiring from dancing in the late ’90s, she began making jewel-like fixtures, mirrors, vessels and candelabra in baroque profusions of glass pieces, eventually concentrating on mirrored glass. Her nature-inspired designs, which begin with hand sketches that can be found all around her Paris studio, include birds, snakes and radiant suns, as well as more abstract crystalline and foliate forms.

All her work is rooted in traditional French craftsmanship. She often uses blown glass made by Verrerie de Saint-Just, a company created in 1826. “I can’t use a normal glass now,” Ms. Ziegler said. “Because of the light, because of the texture in the blown glass. If I use the rose, it’s like a sunset. You have everything in it.”

At her studio, she hand cuts mirrored glass into “thousands and thousands of pieces,” she said. Each fragment is placed into a brass framework, secured with silicone. It is a laborious process that can lead to workdays lasting 14 or 16 hours.

Ms. Ziegler estimated that she spent a month on a large snake mirror featured in her 2023 show at Twenty First Gallery in New York. The design involves a serpent skimming across ripples of water toward a cluster of coral and octopus legs, and what she described as “carnivorous flowers.”

Each of her mirrors is really an imaginary window or door, she said. “It’s not to see yourself; it’s to see out of yourself.”