[bright tone]
[calming music]
♪ ♪
[wind rushing, sand rustling]
Kravitz: The sands that drift across our world
hold a secret.
Over the centuries,
we have learned that these golden grains
can be magically transformed.
[soft music]
♪ ♪
This is a story
of an artist
who turned sand
into glass...
creating wonderous objects
inspired by nature.
They say
she can capture the wind.
[wood creaking]
[warm music]
♪ ♪
The wind has a special purpose
as it blows across the flat lands
of the Netherlands.
[sails creaking]
Centuries ago,
the Dutch became a nation of wind catchers,
harnessing its power.
[soft music]
♪ ♪
[plants rustling softly]
It's here
that Bibi lives,
a glassmaker famed
for an act of magic.
Inside her creations,
she conjures the wind.
[wind rushing]
[chiming]
In her workshop,
she follows the ancient process
of glassmaking...
[ethereal music]
Each step
calling upon
one of nature's primal elements:
air
and earth...
water...
and fire.
♪ ♪
She begins by placing sand in her furnace.
Fire
is the frontier that changes everything.
[sizzling]
The texture of molten glass
is extraordinary.
It is neither a solid
nor a liquid.
Bibi likens it to honey.
[drips plopping]
Inside her crucible
you can hear the last grains of sand
slowly transforming into glass.
[crackling]
Nature has its own furnaces.
Inside these wonderous rivers
flow currents of silver and gold...
But the richest ingredient by far
is silica,
the crystal building blocks of glass.
[soft, dramatic music]
♪ ♪
In Hawaii,
these streams are said to embody
the island's goddess of fire and creation...
Pele-honua-mea.
[reflective music]
♪ ♪
Pele-honua-mea
is also a goddess
of the wind,
and as she blows across
the silica rich lava,
dark volcanic glass
is formed.
[birds chirping]
Around the world,
the wind breathes life
into nature,
and for Bibi,
it is an irresistible challenge
to catch hold of its playful spirit.
The next element in her process
is air.
Through a hollow pipe,
Bibi's apprentice delivers a gentle breath.
[apprentice exhaling]
As it's infused with air,
the glassmaker's creation begins to take shape.
[calming music]
♪ ♪
As she spins the glass,
Bibi imagines the wind in every shimmering strand.
[softly stirring music]
♪ ♪
Still at hundreds of degrees,
these threads fuse
into the surface of the glass...
Creating textures and distortions
that will eventually play with the light.
[light piano music]
♪ ♪
[sizzling]
As the hours pass,
she returns the glass to the furnace...
The heat allowing it to be further shaped
and transformed.
Curiously, all molten glass looks the same.
Only as it cools
do the true colors begin to emerge.
In the heat of her evolving creation,
Bibi senses the deep hues
and radiance of a sunrise.
[camels grunting]
[bell ringing]
Some say the earliest glass on Earth
was created by accident.
As Arabian nomads journeyed across the desert,
their campfires may well
have fused and transformed the sands
on which they burned.
[soft, sweeping music]
♪ ♪
Pieces of glass
found in nature
are often dark and clouded,
colored by the elements from which they were forged.
[wind howling]
Desert glass
is the color of burnished sand.
Creating glass as colorless
and invisible as the wind
would take ancient glassmakers
centuries to perfect...
But the results would be sublime.
[soft piano music]
♪ ♪
Water is the glassmaker's final element.
In Renaissance Venice,
a guild glassblowers
lived on the nearby island of Murano.
For generations they worked in secret
in search of completely new type of glass.
Perhaps seeking to capture
the reflections around their workshops,
they were the first to invent cristallo...
Glass,
breathtaking in its purity.
Their secret was adding powders of manganese
to their furnaces
to remove the colors and impurities within sand.
They created a glass as translucent
as the water
and the wind.
[bell tolling]
The secrets of clear glass
would eventually escape the waterways of Venice...
Carried by merchants
across the trade routes of Europe
to the artisans and workshops
of the Netherlands.
[warm music]
♪ ♪
Fire and air,
water and earth...
each element has played its part
in Bibi's process.
In the last moments with her creation,
she studies its contours
and makes final adjustments to its shape.
As the glass finally cools,
the perfect clarity she sought
slowly emerges.
She smooths away imperfections.
[soft, calming music]
♪ ♪
Like the wind,
it has no true color.
Instead, it does something remarkable:
it absorbs the colors around it.
With the elements,
Bibi has transformed glass
into the essence of the wind.
[soft, stirring music]
♪ ♪
The way it moves over the water...
The way it flows across the land...
The way
it shapes our world.
[birds chirping]