Lots of eye candy today of the "reactive glass" that I've been experimenting with....my glass hasn't been about reactive metals and frit to create different colors and effects. Other artists create beautiful beads using these materials and glass and I've been a great admirer of them - my glass has been about understand each color of glass in it's unaltered state and understanding how it flows in the flame and how it "holds" its form. Understanding the glass has allowed me to choose the right glass for whatever I was trying to create. So, for example, ivory can be very difficult to use in sculpture - a few years ago when I started to make my glass hands, I found ivory glass wasn't the color to use - it was too "floppy" in the flame. Black, Ink blue, cobalt glass held it's shape much better and I could sculpt with these colors much easier than ivory. As I've increased in skill, I am able to use whatever color I want but I keep in mind the properties of each color and construct any piece based on that. What attracts me to the glass isn't the color but its sculptural properties.
But lately, I've been interested in combining the reactive glass with the sculptural characteristics of glass. So, here are my experiments - faux borosilicate beads and a reactive glass form Doublehelix Glassworks. You see a familiar motif here, the hand, I always have to sculpt a hand out of whatever I'm doing. As a sign language interpreter and an artist, I make a living from my hands. Therefore, it's an appropriate motif for me.
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