This week I am working on a commissioned piece for a client in Sarasota, Florida. She lives in a penthouse overlooking a waterway and the piece will go on her bedroom wall. This is not just a bedroom, but a dream bedroom – all white with crisp Irish linens, silver bed, Italian mirrored nightstands, and creamy cashmere walls.

I am making a clear glass tree with a secret, surprise element. I will sandblast the tree for a frosted appearance, and so the tree can be “read” more easily (Shane Fero taught me about taking the distracting shine off glass so we can “read” it more easily). 

The main trunk of the tree is nearly complete and the branches are sketched with yarn.   Overall size is approximately 55″h x 46″w x 8″d.

Imagine the tree mounted 2″ off the wall with a light about 3 feet away to the bottom left.   The tree will be lit and beautiful shadows will be cast along the wall and up onto the ceiling.

I’ll post more images as I complete the tree and it is installed.  Once the client has received it, I will divulge the surprise element.

Today I am applying the images to my autobiographical cyclone.  After messing around with various possibilities, I copied the images onto glassine, a translucent paper. 

The images are faint, with the ghostly quality I wanted.  Some are legible, others probably not unless someone is familiar with the scenes.  This is the quality I am after.  The images are like memories - ephemeral, changing with time, and two people remembering a shared incident can have completely different memories. 

I’m adding images and more threads as I go.  Once these are all complete, I will make a hanging apparatus and install the piece.

(My photography skills are quite lacking, as evidenced here.  I apologize for that!)

The structure of the reed and thread cyclone is nearly complete.

Time to start digging through old photo albums for the images to go on it.  I have figured out how to print onto a transparent paper called Glassine.  I will make up a small cyclone to do tests on, as I have to figure out how to adhere the images to get the ghost-like quality I want.

The first two pieces in my expecting theme are complete.

I started with a botanical cyclone, my symbol of growth and becoming.  It has a peach gestating inside, like a new idea formulating, a new direction being considered, a new commitment on the verge of being declared, connected to the cyclone vine with a long umbilical stem.

Second is a full-bellied vessel vine, pregnant with a nearly ripe, ready-for-the-world lemon.  The vines of this piece are made of an interesting color called English Ivy, reminiscent of the glass I used for the acorn trunk piece.  It appears opaque until light shines behind it, and then it is actually a transparent ivy green with blue and butterscotch streaks.

I plan to attempt pushing my idea of expectant plants even further, with the idea of enclosing the fruit fetuses in glass amniotic sacs within the plant.  That will be a tremendous technical challenge, but certainly interesting!

In the other realm of my recent expectations, our puppy is arriving this Saturday.  After nearly 2 months of our family unsuccessfully attempting to agree on her name, Brent finally coaxed the kids into letting me name her.  I named her Piper.  When I was pregnant with our youngest son, Reilly, and before we knew he was a boy, we had chosen Piper for the baby’s name if it was a girl.  So now our puppy will be Piper.

Here’s to expectations!

As glass cools, it crystalizes.  After being heated above 950 degrees farenheit (my torches run about 2200 degress), a piece of glass must cool slowly enough that the entire piece cools at the same rate.  If one area of a piece of glass cools more quickly than another area, it will crystalize earlier, causing a crack in the glass. 

For example, on my pieces, the leaves are much thinner than the branches. If I cool the pieces too quickly, the leaves will cool faster and crack off the thicker branches.  If a branch itself is cooled too quickly, the surface will cool faster than the interior and the branch will crack.  

The process of soaking the heat evenly into the glass and then cooling it slowly enough to allow the entire piece to cool consistently is called annealing.  Given that glass is a poor conductor of heat, the annealing process must go very slowly! 

After making the parts for my pieces – the leaves, fruits, branches or vines – I anneal them.  Then I make the actual sculpture and anneal that. 

Annealing cycles for my work range from eight to fifteen hours.  Artists who cast thick pieces of glass anneal for several days!

Annealing is done in a kiln; the same types of kilns that ceramicists use.  Most artists have digital controllers into which they enter the annealing cycle, and then let the kiln and controller do their work. 

Without a controller, the artist would have to watch over the kiln and manually adjust the temperature settings to make sure the kiln stays on cycle.  That was how I annealed before I bought a digital controller.  Here was a situation when I got distracted and forgot to turn the kiln down after it reached the highest temperature I needed. 

I think Salvadore Dali would have loved this!

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