Finding comfort from suffering, this figure could be seeking both psychological and physical comfort. The fetal position has long been recognized as the most relaxing position one can assume, because it gives both the mind and body time to reflect calmly on its surroundings. It allows for deep breathing while protecting your vulnerable interior. There’s a sense of both sinking and rising as she submerges into the glass foliage whose budding growth envelops her.

Sculpted porcelain clay with glaze and 24K luster is then matched with a hand-blown glass skirt in the murrini pattern.

An assemblage of porcelain, glass and metal elements.

An assemblage of porcelain, glass and metal elements.

An assemblage of porcelain, glass and metal elements.

Hot-sculpted grey glass.

A porcelain figure rests upon a multi-chambered glass vessel with added drips and hot-sculpted elements.

A porcelain figure rests upon a multi-chambered glass vessel with added drips and hot-sculpted elements.

Hot-sculpted opaline glass.

Sculpted porcelain clay with glaze and white gold luster is then matched with a hand-blown glass skirt in the murrini pattern.

Porcelain with glaze and 24K gold luster combined with multi colored glass murrini blown into a hot-blow mold. 

Porcelain with glaze and 24K gold luster combined with multi-colored murrini glass

Murrina II is porcelain on the top with glaze and white gold luster. He skirt is mold-blown glass murrini with silver leaf.

Porcelain with glaze and gold luster, mold-blown glass

Hypnagogia is the transitional state which occurs between being awake and falling asleep. The brain’s electrical activity can be measured in waves and the first stage of sleep where Alpha waves occur, are slow, spread out waves which I reiterated in the pattern of the glass dress. This in-between state of “almost"

is where hallucinations, lucid dreaming, body jerks and sleep paralysis can occur. The figure’s gesture, though not in a recumbent position, represents this state with her almost closed eyes, her hands almost touching her face, or almost touching each other. Her dress, almost appearing as a blanket, isn’t the solid heavy weight of slumber but instead an ethereal translucent shell.

A made up word, describing the fugue state of being lost in your thoughts or within a daydream. The glass murrini patterns in her dress distort and blur as she gazes off into space, her hand posed as if prepared to catch herself from falling.

Salt-fired Stoneware, Mold-blown glass and hand-blown glass heart. As the piece turns, you can see the embracing couple share one heart at it's core.

To waver in mind, will or feeling. A heart torn two ways, a face in hesitation, hands reaching in opposite directions, yet still indecisively passive. 

Similar to a collaboration of the body and mind, I combined glass with porcelain merging them together at the heart. Whether wavering in thought or in feelings, or in our unique differences from one another, it's the Buddhist like non-duality of our human nature keeping us together and indivisible.

Merging both ceramic and glass together to appear as one mass, the upper portion being clear glazed porcelain blending down into ivory colored mold-blown glass. Both elements created through vastly different processes, contain similarities in qualities by being born of earth and fire.

Burgeoning with a profusion of budding elements, this enigmatic figure seems to materialize from a bubble of glass forming a ruff where her bust was built inside like a “ship in a bottle”. This interior illusion invokes wonder and a sense of uncomfortable fragility. Is she emerging into beauty or being submerged by it?

The restless mind and the physical discomfort of troubled sleep are represented in this series. Although the glass seems to have a pillowy cushioning effect, the reality is it’s hard, cold and frozen into immobility. The cavities within the glass bubble enfolding the bodies represent the myriad of chambers one’s mind often meanders through while struggling to find sleep.

The restless mind and the physical discomfort of troubled sleep are represented in this series. Although the glass seems to have a pillowy cushioning effect, the reality is it’s hard, cold and frozen into immobility. The cavities within the glass bubble enfolding the bodies represent the myriad of chambers one’s mind often meanders through while struggling to find sleep.

The restless mind and the physical discomfort of troubled sleep are represented in this series. Although the glass seems to have a pillowy cushioning effect, the reality is it’s hard, cold and frozen into immobility. The cavities within the glass bubble enfolding the bodies represent the myriad of chambers one’s mind often meanders through while struggling to find sleep.

Representing the inside of a skull, not just physically but mentally symbolic of the chambers of your mind, this piece joins the body and the mind.

A portrait of my professor Jack Wax

Glass has various natural physical characteristics that allow it to take shapes unlike any other material and also has the ability to be manipulated. In this piece, I force the glass to take on the resemblance of the human figure on the outside while allowing its natural ductility and adhesion to itself to create the abstract tangled core. Seemingly casual in pose, the gruesome contrast of exposed tangled red represents several dichotomies; i.e. inside vs outside, representational vs abstract, beauty vs grotesque.

An assemblage of porcelain, glass and metal elements.

An assemblage of porcelain, glass and metal elements.

An assemblage of porcelain, glass and metal elements.

An assemblage of porcelain, glass and metal elements.

An assemblage of porcelain, glass and metal elements.

An assemblage of porcelain, glass and metal elements.

Pate de verre is a casting process of heat fusing glass sand into a fragile shell; a medium which best suits my fascination with the enigmatic line between sleep/death, subconscious/conscious and other psychological altered states.

The transitioning from solid powder Pate de Verre to crumbling coarse frit represents the disintegration of our memories, where they start off distinctly whole but over time become abbreviated. Inside the head, a solid glass orb contains an inward cone creating an optical vortex, visually suggesting one can see into the mind or look into the past.

2021

4'x2.5'x1' 

Finding comfort from suffering, this figure could be seeking both psychological and physical comfort. The fetal position has long been recognized as the most relaxing position one can assume, because it gives both the mind and body time to reflect calmly on its surroundings. It allows for deep breathing while protecting your vulnerable interior. There’s a sense of both sinking and rising as she submerges into the glass foliage whose budding growth envelops her.

The hundreds of individually created bubbles are slumped and fused together and pour out of the head and the heart of this life-size figure.  This contrast of mediums as well as that between realism and abstraction represent the corporeal not being able to contain the heaviness of one's internal thoughts (head) and feelings (heart).

Two pairs of arms posed as if two people embracing one another are instead hovering over ephemeral glass bubbles. These dark spheres could represent the frisson of passion or perhaps more enigmatically, the fact that we each are contained in a bubble of self that can never be truly penetrated by another.

Stoneware, Hand-blown glass, wire, steel and paper