My current work in glass reflects my interest in language, literature, transparency, and found objects. These interests coupled with my process of visualization provide the impetus for making art. There is a visual resonance connected to objects where, due to their associative impact, the object’s image returns to mind again and again long after first sight. It is curious how apparently unrelated images occupy my mind at any given time leaving me to question the nature of chance and coincidence when these images begin to make sense or reveal their inherent logic and connection to each other.

Combining my interests as related to experience and including them in my work has been my central focus. An interest in literature has a led me to yet a different sort of learning. I can learn vicariously through an author’s experience and creativity. I find that authors often use creative devices to structure or formulate a story, involving processes similar to those artists use when developing their work. I engrave text from my favorite works of literature onto the surfaces of my pieces. At times the text evokes images and I engrave these images onto the glass. Engraving allows me to objectify my experience of the text and personalize it by handwriting. The handwritten text adds a surface or skin to the glass attracting attention to the form of the object. Handwriting itself takes on a different connotation in an age of digitally generated text.

Glass for me is the perfect medium with which I can overlay words over words or images over images; in this way the nature of the definition of a text can be extended or obscured. In Finnegans Wake James Joyce had combined words together to create new words. Joyce’s invention of a new word by the combination of two or more existing words opened up language to personal interpretation. I try to combine objects in a similar way to create metaphors that point beyond the reality that gave rise to them. By taking the image of the human figure or a fragment of the figure out of its usual context and combining it with found objects I hope to set up a situation where these objects can play off each other. Through this process of combination I attempt to arrive at a sculptural object that contains something new and different from the parts it comprises.

My current work has also developed from an understanding of the utilitarian potential of glass and strives to meld the material and technical sensibility of glass with the metaphorical implications of the material. When creating sculptural art forms it is my intention to embody these forms with my character, in this way my work is a visual diary.

[Posted by Justin on behalf of the artist.]