On The Edge

This series is named On The Edge for a reason - purely sculptural, it requires me to push the glass to the brink of collapse, at times opening random holes due to the thinning walls. There's no preconception other than the colors and the juxtaposition of flowing lines and the squareness of the ribbon. Once I start inflating a piece, it is all about what the glass is doing and what I see as my response to that. It is a truly meditative process that requires me to abandon any notion of a 'final result' and instead focus solely on the experience. 

Meadow started out as an attempt to capture the elegance of the Calla Lily, but as the color scheme developed, other shapes kept inserting themselves and I have learned not to fight what is happening...

So while I continue to experiment with the shape of the long necks, the overall feel of the series has become more about wild flowers in a sunlit meadow.

The Desert Blue Series goes back quite a while, representing the transition point between Hawaii and Santa Fe, as far as colors go. The outside colors are clearly inspired by the desert but I put the ocean on the inside and I have always loved the combination. The original series had horizontal lines, the inevitable outcome of spinning a string of glass around a ball of glass that's at the end of a blow pipe. In my mind's eye, I have seen the pieces with vertical lines for a long time and I finally decided to put in the extra work to reverse the pattern. This requires me to create an extra hole in the side of my ball after wrapping the string of orange around it. I then have to attach a second blowpipe to the new hole, break off the first pipe and close the resulting opening. After equalizing the wall thickness, which is distorted by the whole process, I can begin inflating and shaping the piece. Glassblowers refer to this process as 'Reversing the Access' and it adds between 45 minutes to an hour to the creation of the piece.