blinded by a grapevine

This body work is largely influenced by contemporary glass caster Carol Milne, multimedia artist Cappy Thompson, and modern glass casters Libesnksy and Brychtova. The way color is utilized in their work to bring forth light within glass is something that pushes me to keep exploring the medium further, especially with kiln-cast glass. My work aims to highlight the protective nature that queer people are forced to practice in order to fully bloom into ourselves under a government and society that aims to suppress us and our way of life. I aimed to make this body of work readable to an audience broader than queer people, specifically hoping to strike a chord with some conservative minded people that typically wouldn't typically agree with a transexually driven narrative. My process for this body of work was broad and spanned over many forms of glass working and modeling. Through this process I discovered a love for hand sewing fabrics to create models to be turned into glass. Through a back-and-forth casting process of making a model, and then making a mold to obtain a wax version of this model, to then make a plaster mold around this wax to then steam out, which then becomes the final mold that glass will be kiln-cast into, I am in constant conversation with not only my modeling material but each intermediary process of making. I aim to continue investigating these glass processes and incorporate more mixed media.