Artist Statement

At 32, I was nine years into a journey that had taken me from the Peace Corps in Guyana to an international school in Ukraine. I had visions of adding another country to my resume until my direction changed with the diagnosis of bilateral temporal lobe epilepsy. Suddenly, I lost what I believed to be the heart of who I was. My identity had always been, I thought, a music teacher and volunteer. When I returned to my hometown and needed a creative outlet, I found my way, by happenstance, to glass fusing. What I thought would be a two-month introductory course quickly became much more as I fell in love with the art, the studio, and the people I met along the way.

Over the last seven years, I have found that glass fusing can go way beyond simply setting up two pieces of flat glass on a shelf to melt together in a kiln; rather, glass can be thoroughly transformed through varying the setup, force, heat, and shaping.

Each piece begins as multiple sheets of flat, single-color transparent or opalescent glass. I use a variety of techniques to manipulate the glass, so the individual sheets come together to become something entirely new.

In ‘Electric Storm’, I melted glass through a metal screen where, in a happy accident, parts of the screen flaked off into the glass itself. The embedded abstract splinters of metal in the swirls of blue reminded me of my journey undergoing surgery to implant a responsive neurostimulator in my brain. 

‘Synaptic Bloom’ used a technique in which glass is fired under bricks, resulting in pieces that are extremely thin, with movement of the glass creating unique color gradients. This is especially fitting, as it echoes my relationship with epilepsy — knowing that something can be distorted through pressure, yet still find release and emerge unexpectedly beautiful.

Art