Final Exam

Artist Statement:

For our final assignment for our AP Art History class, we were given the prompt to create something that was inspired by something we learned this year. We knew what our final was going to be from the beginning of the year so it was something I was thinking about throughout the year, and I thought that it was going to be very difficult to come up with an idea. However, when it came time to actually create our projects, I instantly knew I wanted to try to make something inspired by gothic stained glass but stray away from the biblical scenes and depict something related to nature. In the beginning, I was thinking of compiling multiple flowers, some you don't see together because they bloom at different times of the year taking some inspiration from Rachel Ruysch's Fruit and Insects, but I had limited space and wasn't confident enough in cutting glass. Eventually, I decided to create a piece with lupines as my subject because they are summer flowers and they come in a variety of colors so I had many options when it came to choosing my subjects.

The materials I used were small glass tesserae glued onto a clear glass panel. I, unfortunately, wasn't able to create a traditional stained glass panel as we didn't have all the right materials, but I really enjoyed the glass fusion process and how the final product turned out. In doing this piece first, it gave me the experience and helped boost my glass cutting confidence allowing me to create a slightly more complex piece that utilized those glass scoring and cutting skills developed.

Going into this project I envisioned creating a composition of multiple spring and summer flowers with stained glass. However, when it came time to actually create the piece, we didn't have all the right materials available to create traditional stained glass so I decided to make something using glass fusion. It was at this point that I realized trying to fit everything from my original sketch into one 6x6" glass background was a little too ambitious and to be honest a little intimidating because I didn't know how to score and cut glass yet. I had also envisioned some of the flowers to be created out of two or three solid smooth pieces of glass and trying to do that right off the bat seemed like a bit more than I chew. So I changed my initial plan a little and decided to only depict the lupines because they are layered and the glass tesserae would achieve that textured look I desired. When it came time to actually create the piece it was much like what I imagined the Romans did when they created their mosaics. It was much like putting a puzzle together because the pieces would almost interlock together. Overall I liked how this piece came out and I really liked the process of creating a piece like this because I found it to be extremely therapeutic. I was also really happy with the setting I chose to fire this piece with, it's just at the point where everything is rounded nicely, but there is still differing textures. I am planning on creating a few more pieces after this trying out some different techniques and different firing temperatures to experiment and see how they change the look of a piece.