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My Process

Working with glass fascinates and challenges me. It’s like painting a canvas that I bring into three-dimensional form.

 

Both my nature inspired works and my bold abstracts are expressions of my love for color and design. Each composition emerges through a tedious process of creating with as many as six layers of hand cut glass shards, fine glass powders, and a variety of components including my hand crafted marbles and stones, glass strings and elements cut from cane and rods of glass.

 

My sculptural works embody my love for constructing something from scratch, piece-by-piece. These works are free-formed with individually cut and crushed shards of glass, carefully arranged and layered to create their organic shapes. My designs blend overlapping colors and often feature thin threads of curled glass, accents such as murrine or millefiori, and elements that create depth and movement. Because each sculptural work is constructed without a glass foundation, this technique requires a delicate balance of space and weight in the layers in order to successfully withstand the firing process while forming to its intended shape.

Depending on the complexity of a piece, it takes up to one week to fully complete a single glass work from concept, preparation, design and construction, firing cycles, and the finishing process. Each one is a unique, individually crafted work of art. No two are ever exactly alike.

 

For all of my works, forecasting how the glass will pull, expand, and meld during the heating and cooling cycles is essential from the start. It's like working backwards. Ultimately, my process is a creative fusion of prediction and precision. Sometimes I get it right and sometimes I don't, but the risk of failure never outweighs my love for the challenge.

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Rose Garden, 2022
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Purple Haze, 2021
Permanent Collection
Central Piedmont Community College, Charlotte, NC
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