Figure 3: “Delivered Presence”; glass thread, void, LED light, acrylic paint, wood; approximately 7’ x 5’ x 10’; 2024. Still frame image of an installation in an out-of-use mailroom in the Tyler School of Art lobby. The glass thread suspended in the light chamber appeared merely as a thin streak of light revealing the individual colors of light mixing together within the empty space.
lightning and meteorite strikes (fulgurites and Libyan Desert Glass, respectively). The first man-made glass objects date to at least 2500 BC in Mesopotamia.4 In my case, the discovery of glass happened much more recently. It was during a visit to the Corning Museum of Glass in January of 2022 that my “Aha!” moment occurred. My wife and I were strolling through the contemporary art wing of the museum when we came upon a pair of large, kiln-cast works by the famous Czech husband-andwife duo Stanislav Libenský and Jaroslava Brychtová. One in particular, Red Pyramid, had me truly awestruck. The ways in which it glowed, and the color of the glass transitioning from blood-red at the thickest point to sizzling yellow at the thinnest point, gave the sculpture an energetic presence unlike any art object I had previously experienced. I simultaneously felt a mix of conflicting emotions: wonder and joy from experiencing something so extraordinary, combined with despair and regret from realizing that I was only then becoming aware of the magic of light and glass.
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designing lighting
I felt that I had just found the material singularly capable of encapsulating my fascination with the phenomenal qualities of light, color, form, and texture. Where had glass been all my life? To make up for lost time, I enrolled in the Master of Fine Art program in Glass at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University. It felt like the only way to immerse myself in working with glass in an environment in which I could leverage my previous experience with light and develop my research and practice as an artist. To date, I had spent about ten years working with light in various contexts, from theatrical lighting design in New York City to architectural design and laboratory experimentation at the Lighting Research Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute where I completed my Master of Science in 2015. I knew that working with glass would challenge me to work with light in entirely new and exciting ways. And so it has. These past two years at Tyler have launched my investigations into how glass reveals the ephemeral characteristics of light, unlocking