I recently completed a few pieces that are a pretty drastic left hand turn from my usual highway… the project started as my projects usually do: a client request for glass art to fit a specific place, to solve a unique problem. Technically, the pieces seemed like the obvious answer, but I only needed to make one to fit the bill, and I suddenly found myself making a whole new series of works instead.
These pieces are formed from the “bones” of experiments I’ve been conducting in my studio throughout the course of my entire glass-working experience. Luckily, glass has an infinite shelf life so as long as you can find the space, you never have to get rid of everything.
Unfortunately, for years it seemed like I was keeping bins and bins of elements that, while beautiful unto themselves and representing a huge amount of material and time, just would never be more than pretty bits of glass. Bins and bins of beautiful… rubbish?
But as I continued to grow that collection of: “Can glass be twisted into springs?” “Maybe over this copper pipe? Ooo… look at that reaction, I want to look into that more…” “What happens when I put glass together in specific patterns and then drastically heat and pull that pattern apart in the kiln?” “Does this glass contain selenium? How does it react with silver?” “I wonder if it’s possible to make ‘bubbles’ of color by wrapping a tiny pebble size piece of clear glass with powdered grains of colored glass…” “How does repetitive heat work affect glass color?” “How does humidity affect the results of glue chipping?”
Patterns emerged. And I began to see a conversation of beautiful elements that complimented and reacted with each other to make a whole conversation from those tiny parts.
Making glass isn’t a very visually riveting process — at the outset it’s exciting: intense heat transforms very common, basic materials into something mesmerizing and amazing. But then as an artist, you spend days, weeks, sometimes months working with that raw material in its much colder state. I try to remember that bold colors that will eventually appear while I’m molding, shaping, heating, breaking, sanding, heating, cooling… over and over again. To an outside viewer, it must be sheer drudgery.
But every little addition begins to build, and patience is rewarded. And the heat-work is cumulative and the glass retains those memories, the molecules gaining intensity over time that remembers the fire they came from.
So in the end, I feel these “paintings” are reflections of what we can build when we apply ourselves with patience to both the forest and the trees; understanding that every action is an element that can be a part of the pattern of the whole.
There are no wasted experiments. “Is it possible” is perhaps the wrong introduction to working with glass. Anything can be made from glass; it is the amazing, incredible, stupendous fourth state of matter. Just like homes, buildings, businesses, cities, global economics, the question is not “is it…?” but “HOW…!”
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