Plastic piping original mass-produced to carry water from place to place has found a likewise liquid-related second life in the form of flower-holding vessels, blown out like glass into fresh new shapes.

Adapting traditional glass-blowing techniques, Japanese artist Kodai Iwamoto has created a series of signature vases that still show elements of their past lives, including production stamps. The above video illustrates the creative process.

The expansion process also naturally deforms these stamps as well as the coloration of the pipes, creating a variety of hues and details showing the origin of each piece. Custom effects, like vertical ridges, can be achieved by creating slatted formwork (then sliding the tube inside, so when it deforms its shape is informed by the slats).

This ‘Ex-Portation’ series explores the intersection of everyday object reuse and handicraft, turning cheap and available materials toward a new beautiful and functional purpose.

More about the process: “by applying air pressure into a closed pipe,” the artist “then slowly warmed the pipe with a heater to make it soft and moldable. As with glass blowing, many factors such as the shape of the mold, air-pressure and the speed of heating the pipe’s surface affect the shape of an object.”

The whole process is remarkably straightforward, which is part of its beauty — ordinary people can follow this artist’s lead and use simple technology to craft similar works from local scraps.

Resin is often used creatively to fill in the gaps wooden shapes, but these vases take the opposite approach and employ sliced logs with waned edges as a framing device rather than making it the primary focus of the work.

Los Angeles artist Scott Slagerman worked with Jim Fishman on this Wood & Glass collection, in which each vase is blown into a wooden void.

Naturally, each creation requires careful planning and execution, involving hot materials coming in contact with flammable ones. Some of the works are clear, but reds, purples, greens and oranges playfully compliment and contrast with the woods employed as well, ebbing and flowing as hues do in nature.

Slagerman “has always been captivated by glass – how it is transformed from a fragile, yet unyielding solid state to molten fluidity and back again; and how this mutable substance, through a process that is both delicate and dangerous, can create objects both essential and esoteric.”

He is “fascinated by the role that glass plays in architecture, as well as in the everyday objects that we find around us.” Glassblowing is a an art of speed and dexterity, all the more so when working with something that could catch fire and itself be reshaped by the glass being blown.

Combining a Japanese floral arrangement tradition (ikebana) with the hunting convention of mounted trophies, these plant holders allow for clever, colorful and ever-changing organic displays.

The Elkebana consists of a pair of glass flower holders set into a familiar wooden wall plaque, designed by Fabio Milito & Paula Studio and hand-crafted in Italy.

Its creators have had quite a bit of fun naming some of their experimental arrangements, including Nora the Angora, Girgenta the Goat, Jason the Aries, Isidoro the Oryx and Frank the Buck.

Unlike the more morbid mounts that inspired this creation, there is also a greater degree of flexibility – change the flowers or their organization and you change the piece.

And unlike traditional tabletop vessels for botanical displays, this one works well for small living spaces where surface area cannot be sacrificed.

Made of high quality birch plywood, solid walnut, solid oak or cork shield, the wall mounts hold your botanical arrangements in the two hand-blown glass vases.

From its makers: “The ‘ikebana is the ancient Japanese art of arranging floral elements in harmonious compositions. Elkebana brings the ancient art of ikebana to the wall, in order to transform the wall trophy idea into a continuously mutating, colourful creature.”