Hot and Cold

Glass Work

These pictures were taken while moving between the bench, marver, and gloryhole as I worked to create a piece for a much larger project.

___________________________________________________________

Some pieces I made using sections of glass cane. The canes were pulled, cut, and laid out to be brought up to temperature and wrapped onto the vessel during the hot working portion of the making. These were made during an investigation and exploration of traditional italian glass making techniques.

__________________________________________________


______________________________________________________







A venetian reproduction piece.







A series of vases that featured a lattice work on top that were made expressly for flower arranging.

__________________________________________________

While practicing the craft of glass making I began focusing on one of the basic shapes of the bowl. I wanted to practice making the shape without keeping the actual bowls I was making and also wanted some record of the time I was putting in to practice. Something besides the broken remains of unannealed glass. I began burning the rims of the bowls into paper that I had laid out on the old cracked cement floor of the hot shop. The radiant heat of the bowl had an interesting interaction with the cracks of the cement. They were burnt into the paper caught between the cold cement and the hot glass. I created the veils by selecting a predetermined area of the floor and then changing the distance and length of time that I subjected the paper to the heat from a bowl burnt into the same place on the floor. Once again, I was interested in how I could create the necessary circumstances for my work to highlight an interaction of nature and the art making process.

_______________________________________________







Richard Waters invented a musical instrument that has a very eerie sort of sound from metal. He called it the Waterphone and it can be played using mallets or a bow like you would use for a stringed instrument like a cello or violin. It is used mainly for sound effects in tv and film these days. I decided to make on out of glass. It functions in just the same way the metal ones do and makes a very similar sound although much more delicate and difficult to transport.

_________________________________________________________

This bowl was cast onto a marver into a graphite mold and then carved to match a graph I had constructed of my mood over the course of a set period of time. The graph matches the radius of the bowl

_____________________________________________________________


Experimenting in stained glass with different methods of etching. Some is hand etched with diamond bits, some acid etched and some is sandblasted.

______________________________________________

I made these after studying with Judith Schaechter. They were made by sandblasting into flash glass and etching with a dremmel. The celtic dogs were lead caned and the rest were copper foiled.


_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

I colored and pulled so much cane that one time I got the idea to make these faux narwhale horns. We had a cool fireplace mantel back at our house at the time and it looked cool displayed up there. Fun fact: they are actually teeth and not horns. Many people think that these washed up on beaches and may have some role in the unicorn myth.


_________________________________________________________________________________________________

Glass is traditionally used to create containers for important things. This is a twist on that concept as the glass brings to our awareness that the rooms we occupy are a vessel. Glass can be like a snapshot of a liquid frozen in time.


_________________________________________________________________________________________________

You have probably never wondered what happens to hot glass when it is ladled onto a large block of ice. Just in case you have. These glass casts are the result of just that cataclysmic interaction! I just set up the meeting and the conditions and, with a little guiding from my sensitivities and hand, let nature define the specific outcome. It was incredibly beautiful to watch and the resulting pieces are stunning. I displayed each on it's own pedestal and ran a video of the process on a large screen so people could see them being poured.


_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Random sand castings and clear rondels slumped onto the casting of a tire tread to make this crazy glass mashup.


_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

These solid glass orbs function as lenses to magnify and project. They distort the natural pathway of light to make the image appear "funny". I wrote zen koans on the pedestal and then a distorted version that changed the meaning on the wall. I think there are many lenses that change the meaning of things distorting them to such a degree that the initial thought gets lost in translation.


_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

These next images are of a fairly busy hallway that was taken over for the purpose of this art collaboration. I sandblasted sayings into sheets of glass that lined the right hand side of the hallway that had been encased in the white floor, walls and ceiling. People had no choice but to step on the glass breaking the panes and also breaking the sentences written on the panels of glass. The hallway had a slant to the floor so that people walking on the right hand side going down. There was the sound of the broken glass from people walking and we piped in some construction sounds. The bottom of the slanting hallway ended in a giant glass wall made from casting glass blocks that interlocked. On the other side of the hallway that slanted back up we were there trying to piece things back together. People had to walk around us to get by.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

After making these large bubbles I tied them off to large rocks at varying lengths and put them into bodies of water that had clear visibility. This made a strange series of bubbles that seemed caught in time in the water. I harvested some of them back out of the water and put them into these cases. I made the display cases from wood and plate glass using aquarium glue and the wood frame to brace the glass against the water pressure to try and preserve some of the feel of the site specific work and bring it into a gallery setting.