22 November 2005
Diced cubicles
19 November 2005
Bleigiessen
All the WAES groups went to visit the glass installation by Thomas Heatherwick at the Wellcome Trust. These are my pictures seen from level 3 and level 7 (the top) of the the building. It's an amazing achievement, but completely didn't work for me as it's meant to represent the pouring of bleigiessen into water - nothing we have all done over many years has ever looked like this. Also odd not to use lead crystal glass. And what's it really got to do with what the Wellcome represents.
18 November 2005
Door in Cumbria
I am now working on the first of my site-specific projects. This one is for a door joining the inside of a Victorian Cumbrian vicarage to the outside porch. Here's the space it will close off and two trial effects using the curtain motif in one and details from a Chinese painting hanging next to the door in the other. Both have been done in PhotoShop as rough visualisations.
17 November 2005
Cubic boredom
I intended to finish with the cube project today as I am terminally bored with it now and want to move on, but I am still grinding away at a curved surface on one of them and trying to slump another through a potato masher (picture shows Heath-Robinson-like structure). I really feel that interesting as it has been to think around the cube (as it were) the actual mechanics of sufficient workshop time (and reasonable equipment) are disheartening in the extreme.
16 November 2005
A smashed cube gave rise to these two developments from the original: 'Wear it' (personal dig at the 'Wear it, Flaunt it' exhibition of glass jewellery now showing at the Oxo Tower Gallery), and 'Rocks'. Smashed unworked cube cut from the fritted block. Each of the four sections have been differently cold-worked: a) drill-engraved to emphasise the strata naturally formed by the fritted glass, b) lathe cut to mimic a crystalline structure, c) smoothed and partially polished to make it look like jade, d) as a) and additionally sandblasted. Oil-paints have been rubbed into some abraided areas for extra emphasis.