The glass bead game

Georg Baldele's oeuvre is one of extremes. At one end of the spectrum is a seat made from an inflated brown paper bag; at the other a chandelier woven from crystals. In between is a whole range of things, including chairs carved from blocks of recycled paper, brown paper lampshades, floating candles and an extraordinary fabric made from tiny glass beads on double-sided sticky tape. But in spite of running the gamut of qualities and textures - from the opaque to the transparent, from the fibrous to the smooth, from the dense to the vaporous - there is continuity to the work. Baldele has a pioneering way with materials, and each of these projects demonstrates his propensity to seek out stuff and discover how to use it in entirely new ways. The designer's particular speciality is the transformation of apparently single purpose industrial fabric into objects never anticipated by the manufacturer. Baldele takes material destined for a mundane existence and makes it lovely.

The magic of the transfiguration does not pass Baldele by. Working with a substance made from recycled paper interspersed with particles of perlite (heat-expanded volcanic dust), he has made a series of sketches of an elegant industrial circuit, in which blocks of the fabric are melted down and moulded into new forms. The unique property of this material is that it can be liquefied and reset many times over. In theory you could change the form of your furniture annually, yet continue to sit on the same stuff. So far Baldele has not had a chance to exploit this potential. Until he can encourage a manufacturer to create the means to reshape the fabric, he has to reconcile himself to working with the standard flat, rectangular blocks (used primarily for insulation) and carving out the forms he desires. Initially he tried upholstering the furniture in leather, but more recently has bandaged the papier mâché seating in strips of brown paper, making something that is warm and papery to the touch, but solid and cradling to the bottom.

Much less stable and reassuring are Baldele's inflated brown paper seats. Made of a sturdy plastic inner sleeve with a paper cover and usually shaped like a pillow, sitting on one is an uncertain and noisy business. As you wobble they crackle and low-level conversation is rendered virtually impossible. Confronted with the seats at an installation in London's Design Museum, a group of school children became overexcited and managed to burst one. (Baldele insists that one of the kids must have been sporting sharp edges.) In a process of rapid reconfiguration, seat was restored to bag with a bang.

The designer's best known project, and possibly the ultimate transfigurative piece, is an ordinary looking candle suspended on invisible wire, which burns down in around 20 hours leaving not a drip of wax. Called Fly Candle Fly and manufactured by the celebrated German lighting virtuoso Ingo Maurer, the floating candle was conceived by Baldele while still a student at the Hochschule in Vienna. Catching the attention of Maurer, Baldele entered the international arena very early in his career. Despite making many other things beside candles, Baldele still maintains his 'candle man' persona, a theatrical alter ego and a profitable sideline. Current work involves grand installations - Baldele has lit events at the Saatchi Gallery and for Hermès and is now designing a Belgian wedding, aglow with 300 flames. In a brush with the mainstream media, his candle installations look uncannily like the banqueting scene in last year's Harry Potter film.

The manufacture of Fly Candle Fly was not easy - it took a large number of trials and several thousand recalls before Baldele and Maurer achieved a product that burnt straight down and did not drip. The assistance of a large company was vital in rescuing the candle from pre-production limbo, and Baldele has many other projects crying out for similar intervention. Top of the list is his bead fabric, made from the small glass grains more often used for grinding pigments in the cosmetics industry. The material looks perfect, but the standard industrial tape used for backing tears very easily. Baldele has tried reinforcing the whole thing with wire mesh, but that detracts from the twinkle. Now he hopes to find an industrial partner to develop a tape that will not tear and thus allow the material's application in fashion and architecture.

On a recent visit to his studio Baldele made some of this stuff before my very eyes. Peeling back the coating on a piece of tape, he dipped it first in a tank of large baubles and then, to fill in the gaps, in a container of smaller sized beads. Apparently had the glass been heated a little it would have stuck more uniformly, though even without that refinement the results were miraculous. I saw all the ingredients and I watched the process from start to finish, but even so I could scarcely believe the beauty of what emerged. For a while Baldele carried samples in his pockets, tearing off swatches and handing them out to an amazed audience. That the material tears so easily almost adds to its loveliness. Sitting in languid rolls on the studio shelves, it is gorgeous all for its own sake.