Glass Statement
The idea of weather as a metaphor for the tenuousness of existence is one I have pursued for the past 10 years in a variety of mediums, most recently in large-scale, site specific cut paper installations that blur the line between actual, illusionistic and imagined space. Sculptural, dynamic and often glowing with natural or artificial light, these imaginary weather systems appear frozen in an ambiguous moment, bursting through or hovering within a room.
During the summer of 2010 I was a Visiting Artist at Urban Glass in Brooklyn, NY, where I made a new body of sculptures in blown glass, a medium that epitomizes the insubstantial, barely visible forms in nature than inspire my work, from clouds to weather systems to jellyfish to space nebulas to blood cells. Substantive yet physically insubstantial, like my cut paper installations these glass forms can be seen as exhalations and inhalations of space.
VIBRISSA and WHORLS are large sculptural groupings that are configured according to each specific site. These multi-part works are my first attempts to create monumental sculpture out of blown glass. This goal will hopefully be realized in BRUME, a giant glass installation currently in development. A luminous, protean gust of weather cascading out of the wall and through the floor, BRUME will be made of 700+ pounds of blown, cut, sandblasted
and drilled glass held aloft on a hidden steel armature.
These new blown glass sculptures evolve my continuing mediation on creation, destruction, and the transient nature of reality. In that sweet spot where my work, physical space and the viewer come together, I hope to, as James Baldwin wrote, “lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.”
