When thinking about all the metaphors and how my artwork might develop I was immediately struck by the metaphor of cancer cells developing ‘wings’ as they transition from single tumours to metastatic disease. I knew it would be technically challenging making a piece in glass that reflected to any degree what I was visualising in my mind’s eye, but I thought I should try and at least capture something of the feeling by ‘going for it’ and seeing what I could achieve.
To understand the challenge, it’s necessary to share a little about how glass behaves when it’s heated. To make my pieces in ‘pate de verre’ (literally paste of glass), i make a paste from crushed glass or glass powder and apply it to a mould. This is the process you can track looking at my previous post about making ‘cells’. When the glass is then heated in a kiln, the powder or crushed glass fuses together in the heat to make a single surface. What holds it in position is a delicate balance between the level of heat and the structure of the mould. Too much heat and it will drop off the mould, too little and it won’t fuse and will return to dust.
When trying to create ‘wings’, if they are freestanding, they will sag in the heat and eventually drop onto the nearest surface, which might be the body of the cell or might be the shelf of the kiln. Luckily, earlier in the year I had learned a firing technique of firing pieces in a bowl of powder (sand or aluminium oxide) which could support the wings while the glass fused. For this i am grateful to the amazing glass artist Saman Kalantari. Here an image of some pieces I created by combining this firing technique with my own method of pate de verre.
However, what I wanted to achieve with this project was more ambitious technically in terms of the scale and form of the wings in relation to the ‘body’. My initial sketch for the piece is below.
As I’m not super comfortable in two dimensions I went on to make a 3D maquette out of polystyrene and wire mesh. You can follow the whole process through the flow chart below…
THe chart makes it look relatively straightforward, but I can reveal that it was not! Getting the firing right required multiple attempts, with the piece going into the kiln in one way or another about 5 times. Luckily, I wanted the piece to look a bit ‘distressed’ as this is entirely in keeping with the ideas of the cells that emerge with ‘with wings’ from the ‘cell graveyard’ within a tumour. The cell that emerged was a bit battered from all it had been through, but proved that it is possible to make a double-winged entity where the wings have a significant area in relation to the size of the ‘body’ of the piece.
Here is an image of the piece once I had brushed it off and done a bit of coldworking - that is, finishing edges and surfaces with grinding and polishing tools.
GLASS BODIES 