(re)purpose

I can confidently say I have come to a valid conclusion in my relatively short amount of time inhabiting both the Earth and the glass community…humans can be terrible, and the glass community is wasteful. To clarify, I don’t mean all humans are terrible and that everyone in the glass community extrudes copious amounts of glass related waste. As it has become clear in my tenures as a human and a glass artist, we must reconsider things we thought we knew everything about in order to find value in what traditionally gets overlooked (or blatantly disregarded). It is our responsibility to think about the glass community and the ways we take part in the global environmental conversation through this lens.

We walk a strange, binary line. There is a collective desire to be environmentally considerate within our studio practices, and yet, we place great value in this seductive material and pride ourselves on our abilities to go in the furnace for a fourth gather, cast bubble-free objects, and make perfect implosions in flame-worked glass. We turn a blind eye in order to continue producing a medium we’re obsessed with at a level of craft and refinement that is predetermined by market expectation.

There is a trend of devaluing glass in our community that we deem “not good enough.” First attempts at blown glass pieces, an imperfect casting, as well as glass that has not been crafted by the skilled hands of an artist. I’m curious about the qualities that have come to define “Glass Art”, and how powerful the work can be when it pushes back against those expectations.

There is great conceptual and metaphoric potential in taking a common material and utilizing its qualities in uncommon ways. There’s a fascination in the exploration of these specific instances as singular answers among many for how the glass community impacts the globe. By reconsidering ways to utilize readilyavailable glass, we gain the energy spent, the material produced, and the context of their designated or prior uses. By repurposing this material that already exists in the world, we can, in turn, repurpose our studio practices.

Think of the 2,000 crowdsourced and found, mostly industrially-produced drinking glasses utilized in Katherine Gray’s work, Forest Glass. All of the glasses were salvaged from thrift stores, with a sprinkling of some hand-blown vessels; a curious intermingling of the hand-crafted and machine-made. From a distance, this work depicts three jewel-toned trees that are composed of amber and emerald hues. As one approaches the work, finite details of each vessel become pronounced. Yet, the identity of each glass is blurred of its own identity amongst the collective. Gray uses these as a metaphor for the loss of ecosystems through “forest glass” production in medieval Europe. Each tree serves as a ghost of the industry and environment through a recreation of the processes that once destroyed them.

Glass intersects our daily lives as a material that is simultaneously physically present and visually absent. Camoflauged by optical phenomenon, glass can be hiding in plain sight. An impressive example of an artist using this “formless” glass is Gracia Nash’s “skins” of reflective glass beads. Due to their reflective quality, the beads are intended to be used for safety purposes in traffic paint, signs, and pavement. Nash utilizes the beads in her work, Amorphous Flesh, to address feelings of comfort, internal and external feelings of safety, and bodily sensation through tactical experiences.

By combining the beads with high-grade silicone to create these protective “skins," she modifies the initial use of the beads. Nash conceptually reframes the material, yet creating a metaphor in the presence of awareness (and self-awareness) felt through the medium of skin and the function of the industrial glass beads.

Through appropriated, industriallyproduced glass objects and materials, artists can access unique physical and visual qualities, and address meaning as something more powerful than what first meets the eye. Still, the impact of this work goes beyond concept. Subverting the traditions of glass art and its energyintensive studio practices, artists using repurposed and upcycled material shift the impact on natural resources.

While we cannot assume that a significant segment of the glass community will be re-directed from two millennia of glass traditions, perhaps some shining examples that reframe the way we think about glass as a material can inspire others to use the material in repurposed forms that already exist around us. From one perspective, these approaches to repurposing seem too insufficient to make a difference in the long run. But, my concession is that small, well-considered actions can lend way to better informed technical and conceptual practices amongst our collective community.