I originally studied and still continue fine-art painting. Drawing, photography, printmaking and other work with paper based media are important to my practice and sensibilities from these areas feed into my work with glass.
My artworks explore the perception of space through light, especially where a sense of space is ambiguous or disrupted. Complex spatial relationships are created through the layering of surfaces with varying degrees of transparency and reflection. Partial sandblasting on each layer created a mix of reflective and matt surfaces, and variation in the degree of transparency. The work usually contains elements with contrasting clarity and obscurity. It also incorporates rhythm, repetition, and ‘variations on a theme’ where motifs in series undergo subtle visual changes.
Glass and light form the pared down starting point, primary raw materials that when manipulated and combined, offer a myriad of creative possibilities. Clear and coated glass has been chosen as a material for its transparency and the reflective qualities of its surfaces, both of which are variable. When making artwork I explore these variables and the resulting visual and spatial effects created when combined with light – very importantly, itself also variable. Light could actually be seen as the raw material here, which, through interaction with the glass and its various surfaces becomes transformed to create the artwork. It is not the glass itself, but what the glass does that matters.