LIGHT MARKERS

In my quest for scale in cast glass sculpture, I realized that the pieces would be more successful outside.  The problem with most glass formulas that artists had been using up to that point was that they had too high of an expansion coefficient to successfully resist the changing conditions of hot to cold and even wet to dry, especially in environments that are more extreme than coastal California.  I started looking at Pyrex, a family of borosilicate glasses with a reduced expansion co-efficient.  This would allow much more heating and cooling than our regular soda art glass.  The problem was that the lowest expansion formula, a glass that is not easy to cast, but wonderfully durable, developed white veils between all the individual pieces in a fusing kiln.  I tired many ways to reduce that effect, finally realizing that it was a feature, not a flaw.

I made a large group of very tall sculptures, up to 10-feet tall, fully using the size of my biggest kiln.  The forms were based on Tibetan flags that I saw at a local meditation center.  The vertically of these sculptures reaches for the light.  The white veils resemble the wind-torn prayer flags.  Upon showing them outdoors I was surprised to see how the veils captured light and glowed, moved with the sun.  In these sculptures, form was less important than light in that context.  The pieces immediately and dynamically held sunlight so that they were constantly changing.  As the sun moved, the glass immediately changed too.

Eventually, the cool, ice-like quality of sunlight through the fused Pyrex made me wonder about how ice itself would react in the light, a question that led me to Antarctica a few years later.  A small part of that project involved mining ice pieces for display and freezing ice recreated from Antarctica ice molds at home to display as ice again. All become Light Markers in an exterior environment.