Stress
Stress Series
Everyone deals with stress. The years leading up to this project were especially stressful for me; The stress of a new project, a new home, starting school again and living in a new culture inspired me to visualize this emotion.
After finding a vertebra on a walk, I couldn't help myself, but pick it up. Since that day I have casted close to 125 glass replicas and interacted with these vertebrae nearly every day for over a year. Recreating these Vertebrae and repeating the casting process, each time seeking improvement, was an incredibly meditative yet stressful process. Although most were made in the same way, each one came with its own "defects". For a long time I thought of these defects as mistakes, but in the end, I found that those with them were more interesting, than those that appeared flawless. Utilizing both the perceived successes and failures in my pieces pushed me and my work to a new level. The process of casting these vertebrae helped me to better understand how the glass melts and flows within a mold.
These final pieces are the culmination of the research and exploration I have done, they represent the stress we place on our lives, ourselves, our projects and our materials.
Materials used: Jesmonite, Cast Glass, Copper, SteelHang in There
Hold on Tight
Pull Yourself Up
Show Some Backbone
Exhibition
The Making of Stress
I was on a camping trip on the islands of Estonia when I came across a spine. I didn’t have much room to carry it, so regrettably I left it. The next day when I was hiking I came across another spine and later another, but I didn’t have the space to carry them, so just like the first, I left them. When I arrived at my campsite that night sitting on the rocks around the campfire was yet again another spine. I couldn’t resist anymore, so I took a few of its vertebrae. Little did I know I was about to spend the next year and a half obsessing over this object.
When I got back to the studio a month or so later I immediately had to start casting these spines in glass, it was like an impulse, I wasn’t exactly sure why, but I had to make as many as I could. The first piece I made with my new collection of 50 glass vertera was ‘Backbone’. One long movable spine. Making the glass vertebrae for this piece took two months of 9 to 5 casting nearly every day. Many of the pieces did not cast properly and I went through 3 test firings to try and find the best way to cast this object. But in the end I realized that not only do I need to perfect what happens in the kiln, but also the mold itself. This is what led me to my thesis research, and inevitably, Stress. My original idea for this exhibition involved one large spine that was being stretched across the room and the viewers would need to duck under it or step over it to get across the room. But, the day before an exhibition in IMARGEM, a local gallery in Almada, Portugal, an Idea suddenly popped into my head. I had submitted another piece to go into this exhibition, but it had already been displayed at the gallery, and we were allowed to choose the piece we wanted to exhibit for the show, so I took a chance and made the piece ‘Pull Yourself Up’ the day before the exhibition. This piece combined with parts of my original idea and my research is what inspired this series.
If you are interested in learning more about the process of making this exhibition and the glass research that accompanied it, click on the button labeled ‘The Glass Vertebrae’