Being in a glass residency for the week, having never worked with glass or, for that matter, sculpturally has been an interesting and ultimately rewarding challenge. Prepping for the residency became a crash course in physics, optics, and the appropriateness of certain ideas to the medium of glass. It involved a two day consultantship with a glass blower at Urban Glass, a month working with a mold fabricator at Hunter College, many hours googling, and a few months of creatively playing with light and mediating surfaces in a windowless sublet studio in New York City specifically rented for that purpose.

What has been the most intriguing aspect of the first few days of the residency was trying to find a way to cull down an overload of ideas and drawings to what was the most important questions for me to answer concerning the properties of light. I was especially looking for processes, purposes, and forms that had powerful metaphoric resonance. I wanted the glass to be a mediating structure, a thing that was about the way that light passed through it, and what happened as a result of that transition, rather than the glass object as product. 2 ft rondelles in clear, textured patterns became a way to start, a connection with the windows and projections of my work, a way to approach the property of light through a history of an object that is ground in my current practice. It has been fascinating to see the progression from piece to piece…and exciting to think about what is next.