Permanent exhibition

The object is made of blown glass. Its outer surface is white, while most of the larger part is red inside; the smaller part is white throughout. The whole object is sandblasted on the outside and along the edges. The interior glows bright red, and the inside of the smaller part is a luminous white. The object’s appeal lies above all in its colours.

As molten glass is poured, its viscosity creates a folding pattern. In most works this pattern stays hidden, because the colours artists choose conceal it. Involution is one of a series of cast glass objects that allow the viewer to see these invisible patterns. The process is tightly controlled so that only a small amount of colour enters the glass, tracing the flow of the hot glass as it is poured into the mould.

Like André Malraux, I believe that the twenty-first century will be the century of glass or it will not be at all. That is because glass exists under the sign of transparency, just like democracy. Just like love. But, as a Romanian poet once said, “transparency is only proof that God gives us the chance to see, not that we will see.” Only the capacity for insight is a guarantee that we will truly see. I believe in the myth of the window. Without windows we would have no outside and no inside of our own. Without windows imagination is dead. Without windows people’s houses would be nothing but rat holes.

Anyone who uses the internet, and social media such as Facebook in particular, knows the effect of looking at the photographs other people take and post online. They are not works of art, yet they matter a great deal to the people who made them. That was my inspiration.

I use the aesthetics of the small technical glitch, which I believe adds another layer of meaning to the work. I build the pieces from flat, broken glass and draw false visual messages out of it. On the reverse, the image is intact. It is a material error, since it occurs in the glass itself, yet it carries a digital aesthetic. We might call this combination material virtuality. The aesthetic effect depends on how we look at the objects, and even small changes in the angle of view alter it considerably.

All of this was on my mind as I made the sculpture, using a glassmaking technique I developed during my time at the Royal College of Art. It exploits the changeable properties of glass and questions the traditional sense and purpose of the glass workshop.

The studio sets a boundary; it defines and provides the conditions in which the inherent qualities of glass can be discovered. Just as when recording a song with a band, working with glass is a collaboration: I create a dialogue and direct the conditions that allow the material to express itself. This is expressed in the moving inner bodies that inhabit a thick outer shell, allowing the glass to make its own form.

My work is a sculpture made of glass and plants. It was inspired by a particular place, Asahi Spring in Toyama, Japan: a spring that has been used since ancient times and has become a symbol of prayer there. I love the place and often go there, so I decided to make a sculpture in memory of what inspired me. The shape of the glass draws on the landscape of the site, the morning sunlight and the overall atmosphere. Living plants are part of the work, and they keep growing. I often use living plants as part of my sculptures. I find it interesting that as the plants grow, the glass sculpture changes too, and that the glass lets the plants grow. And as with Japanese bonsai, the plants give people a sense of a larger landscape. In this work I used Japanese red pine, a symbol of sanctity in Japan. Moreover, it no longer grows at Asahi Spring, although in ancient times it was the dominant tree there.

We love flowers. They bring freshness and a beautiful scent. Sometimes, though, fallen blossoms end up scattered all around the vase. Malva is different at first sight! It keeps the flowers under a glass dome, so there is no mess around it. Its shape is inspired by Czech Cubism, whose main aim was to capture the inner energy of matter in dynamic objects. The idea of keeping flowers under a glass dome comes from The Little Prince by the French writer and pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. The little prince fell in love with a rose that did not return his affection. At night he covered her with a glass globe to protect her from draughts, though the flower soon began to torment him. The design is built on the contrast between organic and inorganic materials. Malva is an innovative product and a beautiful interior piece.

My work deals with memory and remembrance; I try to draw these phenomena out of the vague spaces of the mind and project them into physical objects. I am particularly interested in episodic memory: our conscious memories of people, places and events, often tied to home, family and holidays. I also work with the idea of the keepsake: through emotional attachment, a domestic object can act as a link to people who are absent, thanks to its capacity to hold and evoke personal memories. In my work, glass reflects different qualities of memory, such as presence and absence, clarity and distortion, fragment and whole. Past Moments explores the fragmentary and shifting nature of memory, as the viewer’s attention moves back and forth between the whole and its parts. The images used in the work are taken from family photographs from the time I lived in Sweden as a child. For me they are full of personal memories, but I hope they will also stir memories in viewers as they follow the loosely suggested narrative. The shape and small size of the glass objects, together with the extraordinary nature of glass as a material, recall the nostalgia of a locket and the ways in which memories can be carried and contained. Past Moments explores the significance of fragments as the building blocks, or cornerstones, of a narrative.

HMMTMIGTT (How Many More Times Must I Go Through This?)

The idea behind this work of three mugs is to deepen understanding through repetition. I was inspired by my own experience of constantly trying to arrive at accurate understanding. The idea is reflected in the making of the work, in the cutting, straightening, polishing and gluing of the objects, and repetition occurs at every stage.

When hand-hammered copper reacts to the high temperature of glass, beautiful colours appear: reds, oranges and violets. The heat also creates a tight bond between glass and copper as they fuse. Paisaje de Cobre carries an additional electroplated layer with a highly polished surface, through which the colour reaction can be seen. Paisaje de Cobre reminds me of the open-pit copper mines of Chile.

Each raindrop stands for a person governed by different emotions. They say the most beautiful songs fall from the sky; others are afraid of them. I listened to the sound of the rain as it fell on my work. A small drop slid down my forehead, almost as if it were made of silk. The drops are my notes. People carry umbrellas, but I was wet all over. I watched the drops dance across the sky, as in a Gene Kelly musical. And I tried to create a three-dimensional image of how rain feels. While working I watched many films and listened to a lot of music. For example, one scene from the film Even the Rain affected me so much that I bought it on DVD. Many other works inspired me, but it was wax that set me free: with it I could finally show what I felt. I decided to make the work using the lost-wax technique. I translated the feeling of rain into figures and made them three-dimensional.

Self-Portrait grew out of the effect that electromagnetic radiation, commonly called light, has on my reading. I wanted to create a work that would give viewers an insight into how I perceive light and the written word. To give viewers a sense of space, light and perception had to be connected. On a white wooden box measuring 4 × 4 feet and mounted on the wall, I arranged twenty white T12 fluorescent tubes close together; their glow recalls white paper. All the tubes are sandblasted and acid-etched with repeated words: white light white snow white pages. The repetition is a play on words, and as the words appear and recur beneath the glow of the tubes, they form a poetic text that begins and ends with snowwhite ageswhite nowhite. The light is aggressive in its intensity; its effect on the space and on the viewer’s sight is like that of a snowstorm. Facing the bright light, viewers suddenly see letters forming a message between the tubes. As they try to focus and read it, their eyes refuse to adjust to the glare. The brightness of the work temporarily affects the viewer’s ability to see and perceive space until the eyes adjust again to normal surroundings.

Heavy machinery, human-like robots and the like, representing an overwhelming power, resemble something born of the imagination of scientists fixated on the future. Although we can still see such visions today, for them it was the ideal of their childhood.

In my master’s thesis I explore the process of inner tension that the viewer can observe. In the project I examine the boundaries, relationships and content between different materials, such as fragile glass and an elastic rubber inner tube. The object was made by compressing inner tubes between glass panels: tension acts from within, while the tubes stretched across the panels create tension from outside. The work deals with the deformation of form at the moment the two materials meet. I let the mutual equilibrium of forces and the balance of the two materials stand out in their purity, within a new spatial relationship.

Towards the end of secondary school, Shay wanted to try a new material and chose a medium she had no experience with: glass. After two years of exploring different ways of working it, she began to find confidence in kiln casting and pâte de verre. What Shay enjoys about glass is its fragility and its ability to imitate other materials. Her current work explores these qualities through line, form, colour and texture created with pâte de verre. She fuses glass grains into clean, simple shapes that play with negative space and texture. The edges of the pieces are rough, uncontrolled and very fragile. Her works do not show the familiar qualities of glass such as transparency or optical properties; at first sight they do not look like glass at all. Green Sphere is a symbol of growth and development, or perhaps of decay; that decision is left to the viewer.

I often think about old age. People cling to youth and fear growing old. The trace of time can seem a cruel thing. I wanted to give the glass the sense of an object that bears the traces of time. By varying the temperature I shaped the glass. The glass holds the marks of time within it.

The final project concentrates above all on instability, contradiction and hypocrisy, which every person carries deep inside. With this work, Betrayed, I try to express that two opposing characters exist in every person and in every life. Betrayed therefore focuses on these opposing characters and the meanings each of them carries. It reflects human unfaithfulness and duplicity.

I explore ways of collecting and preserving natural objects through graphite works on paper and fused and hot-worked glass. This allows me to work with dualities such as growth and decay, life and death, to express the beauty in the transience of life.

Using the lost-wax technique, I make glass sculptures that combine movement and growth, with strongly granular surfaces that evoke bodies. The ambiguity of the form invites closer examination and contemplation of this rendering of the internal, the natural and the architectural within religious infrastructure. Rose speaks to the heritage and craft of traditional casting methods while using new annealing technologies and synthetic materials to push the limits of glass as a malleable material. For me, Rose recalls the saying “wisdom begins in wonder”. It captures a natural granular surface in an unfamiliar material. The devotion to naturalistic detail is captured so elegantly that it calls the material itself into question. The art of observing the world around us, and the sense of wonder I often feel in the light of these new perspectives, resembles the awe felt in a house of worship. For me, Rose is a work that would not look out of place in a modern cathedral, much like a rose window.

In this Pandora’s box the mind wanders from thought to trauma. The temptation to open, the temptation to lock.

Step by step, scavengers attack our feet like colourful little creatures, a kind of memento mori. They are creatures of the night that exorcise my pain. Inside, however, the foot never stops trying to reach the ground, and never succeeds. That is the glass: with its halo, it guards the memory of a bodily transformation. It is the only witness. And although the dream goes on, I know that if the box is opened, nothing will remain.

My work reflects a balance between life and death, memory and forgetting, otherness and identity. It often expresses the emptiness created by form and by the separation of inside and outside, content and form.

The set of jewellery boxes is made in pâte de verre. Each lid is decorated with enamel frit separated by silver wire fired into the glass substrate. The objects are inspired by the traditional Japanese shippō technique, which I learned while studying at Tokyo University of the Arts (Tokyo Geijutsu Daigaku). Their colours and shapes also refer to Japanese lacquerware. The set is something of an experiment: no one at the academy had used this technique before. The pieces are also the result of my training as a jeweller and reflect my fascination with Japanese culture.

As an artist, I do not aim to impress with glassmaking processes. My aim is to express my ideas and concepts. My recent work, which combines digital printing techniques with glass, is called Racial Index. It expresses racial identity through different skin tones, using close-up photographs, within the field of art glass. The images of skin represent different ethnic groups, and combined with glass they offer the potential to use the unique qualities of the material to address racism. For me, making this work marks a new beginning: a deeper exploration of my senses as they lead me to discover my own potential.

From the early and mid-twentieth century until today, many artists have found links between geometry and art, influenced by the philosophy of purity and austerity of form that we have known intimately since Pythagoras.

The Stoics and the Pythagoreans believed that the soul leaves the body in the form of a sphere containing all other forms: the cosmic egg, the negation of time and space, eternity, the celestial world.

Another symbol known since antiquity is the golden ratio, or divine proportion: a symbol of beauty, harmony and perfection in art, science and nature. The term “golden section” was first used by Leonardo da Vinci, as the proportion of the “perfect human body”. Both the Egyptians and the Greeks knew it in ancient times. The idea of harmony and respect lay at the centre of Pythagoras’s philosophical thought. The Egyptian pyramids and the Parthenon are examples of its use.

By taking this form apart, I show my search for perfection and my attempts to refine it. The form is not complete, because my time of searching is not yet over.

My work, a set of hand accessories, comprises five different but closely related objects. The knuckleduster: a weapon that came into use during the American Civil War (1861–1865) and is now banned in most countries, a symbol of direct combat and social decay. The classic ring: a circle, and at the same time the cycle of nature. This work is not meant to hurt. It is a reflection of society, especially of its anger. The variety of shapes shows how different that anger can be: cold, strict and sharp, or unpredictable and naturally organic. Thanks to transparency, we can look down to the roots. Human teeth: a reference to an archaic, even brutal relationship linking past customs with those of today. But sometimes, in a civilised and humane world, words bite harder than physical acts.

Working with glass involves demanding technical knowledge, as well as a craft tradition of its own. This project consisted of two parallel processes in which I tried to find out on what basis glass is judged and valued within the categories of fine art, design and craft. Through dogmatic processes in my experiments with the material, I tried to get to the heart of the creative relationship between maker and material, and thus to its essence.

The results of these experiments are presented in my latest work, made with the theoretical intention of telling a story about the subjective value of the material and its inherent expectations.

First I analysed myself in front of a mirror, asking questions such as how I could present this portrayal to others. I travelled into my imaginary world, let my fantasy run free and tried to explain my state of mind, my psyche and my thoughts.

Animals have always fascinated me, so I use animal bodies in my work. Perhaps it comes from my earlier studies in biology.

The chameleon is one of my favourite animals. It looks foolish, but behind that it hides cunning plans, which is why it is a good hunter.

The chameleon seems calm, yet it scans its surroundings and reflects its inner self outwards. (I do not live in my own country, so in part I am like a chameleon.)

The chameleon creates a friendly atmosphere around itself. It is like a mirror showing scenes from its surroundings.

In the end I found myself in the body of a chameleon.

The work is also a contribution to the current debate on the role of handmade goods in contemporary life. Although the vessels are inspired by factory production, a closer look makes it clear that they are handmade. This offers a direct, physical comparison of mass-produced and handmade goods and lets the user reflect on the merits of both.

In my diploma project I use glass objects to bring the uninitiated viewer closer to the mindset of someone devoted to the aesthetic perfection of animals. The objects are inspired by my many years as a breeder and by the methods used to produce the finest rabbits for breeding and showing.

The surface of the glass creates a graphic impression and a rhythm of lines that bear witness to events that have taken place. The world map also speaks of the changes that have occurred in the Earth’s crust. The theme is eternal and at the same time constantly changing. Every element of the work is made by hand. The six glass objects consist of fifty-four right-angled glass triangles held together by their construction, without adhesives, forming eighteen pyramid peaks in all.

I create my works by analysing myself and my hidden thoughts. Dirty Inside belongs to a series of unique sculptures dealing with different forms of fear. I want to confront my weaknesses and dark sides in search of a deeper understanding. I express my thoughts and feelings by making symbolic glass sculptures. In this composition I use innocent symbols connected with my childhood. I explore the relationship between realism and fantasy, between the innocent and pure and the obscene.

My sculpture sits where craft, fine art and industrial production overlap. With a strong background in manufacturing, I make objects in large quantities, each with absolute precision, and combine these elements in my installation to create something truly unique. The objects follow their own logic. They are all modular systems that repeat to fill space. They are building blocks, molecules and toys. Viewers can start to invent their own solutions to the forms and imagine all kinds of variations at different scales and in different contexts. My glass constructions suggest possible new styles of architecture, experiments with light and ways of intervening in space.

Through my work I want to communicate with others. Viewers have their own personal memories and experiences, and I hope my objects will awaken in them a nostalgia for what they have seen and lived through.

Metaphysics and the potential for healing through the manipulation of energy, or chi, are the driving forces behind my work. The form of this piece derives from a shape that follows the movement of energy within the body. As a whole, my work is inspired by the books of Alex Grey and Agnes Martin, while reiki, yoga and meditation are an important part of my studio practice.

The collection deals with desire and obsession in consumer behaviour around urban fashion. One particular pair of trainers drew me into this project. I like their bright colours and strong, dynamic lines, which contrast with smooth curves to create beautifully designed objects, while the combination of plastics, suede and leather takes centre stage. These qualities of the shoes were my inspiration. I took aesthetic elements from these trainers, chose various colour combinations of patterns, shapes and textures, and translated them into glass. The work centres on overlapping layers of colour and cutting through them. The combination of bright transparent colours inside and opaque colours outside reinforced the idea of seduction, revealing the strongly alluring qualities of glass.

This tableware set, hot-worked at Rückl Crystal a.s., draws on the Rückl glassworks’ vocabulary of shapes and focuses above all on further working and new uses of their cuts. The starting point for the individual shapes and objects was the idea of combining tradition with a new intervention in the original form. I decided to create a variable, modular set. I wanted to include the future owner in it and give them the chance to intervene in the object, helping to break down the traditional division between production and consumption. My aim was not to create a functional drinking set but to work with shapes that would give me freedom and room to intervene in their form. The set consists of several components that the Rückl glassworks produces as standard; the only newly created element is a double-sided connecting stopper. The assembled object need not be a final solution. The set works both as a whole and as individual objects.

The aim of this work was to design a modern set of glasses that brings two materials, glass and porcelain, into harmony. Glass and porcelain share some properties but differ markedly in others. Close to us, the users, in our everyday lives; distant from each other…

It is the idea of something so simple and yet so beautiful, what the Japanese call wabi-sabi, that lives in my work. It allowed me to make glass vessels with no practical purpose, since they are intended not for aesthetic pleasure but as symbols of a process of understanding: they bring the viewer’s conscious mind closer to their own reality and their connection with nature, and will, I hope, allow viewers to forget that we are a superior consumer species. To strengthen the bond between people and nature, they allow viewers to sink into their own state of mind and contemplate the world around them.

Coming to understand Japanese tea bowls inspired me to begin my own personal exploration of the tea bowl.

I work on this paradox, on my own multiplicity: the different aspects that define me and make me who I am. Although this project centres on me, it cannot develop and live without others. To exclude “the other”, their path, their choices, their influences, would be to deny what shapes me and those around me. In fact, we cannot exist without the help of the other, because in our minds we “have to come to terms with them” (our parents and so on). And then, throughout our lives, nothing can separate us from this shared stranger (family, school, work). We all influence one another.

This raises questions. What traces will I leave on others, and what will they bring me? What shapes me, and what are those aspects? What do I mean to the world? In what way are my feelings and my suffering unique? How do I move within myself and within the world?

So this project serves as a report, a first analytical assessment, a realisation of my plurality. I laid my cards on the table and freed myself from some of the heavy responsibilities that had built up until then. The relationship with the other is truly present, because it lies at the root of my questions, just as I am present in it. This sculpture is a kind of testimony to my approach, a personal way of exploring one side of ourselves.

With the theme I chose for my bachelor’s project, Glass Blocks with a Twist, I wanted to change the way people see glass blocks as a building material. I started from the classic shapes of glass blocks and transformed them into bowls using various techniques, mainly cutting and gluing. In doing so I took the material to another level, while keeping it functional and aesthetic. The main aim of my work was to create functional and, above all, aesthetically pleasing objects from this prefabricated glass element, objects that would make a fitting addition to a contemporary interior.

I am fascinated by the idea of identity: our highly individual ability to understand and influence one another. It intrigues me how all people, made of the same matter, can be shaped so infinitely differently. Every individual is born a blank slate. What we hold on to and connect with through experience is what allows us to learn, develop and form an identity. The variations of this outer experience are endless, and what happens to each of us is known as individuality. How we perceive the rest of the world depends, as with glass, on a very delicate construction. A single small change in the process would result in an entirely different individual. However unlimited our possibilities in shaping our own identity, each of us is also bound by what we have been given, in the sense that our perception cannot go beyond that construction.

I chose glass as the medium through which I create relics from a dark, baroque world of nightmares and illusions, where the boundaries between matter and spirit, certainty and imagination blur. Reliquary of My Body seems solid and impenetrable at first sight, yet it reveals an inner dimension of moving light and energy. It reflects the experience of struggling inside a cage of intangible but utterly real and pressing nightmares and fears. As for the material, I am fascinated by early glassmaking processes, which often lead me to choose more matt or chemically corroded, antique-looking glass when I add metal salts for colour or texture. The dynamic or desperate qualities this process can create in the glass correspond to the emotional content of each sculpture, allowing my medium to be as personal and expressive as the form I give it.

Twice you can walk the same road
the road through life
years later
again
but the circle you trod the first time
seemed dark, full of piercing thorns,
not everyone can make it through
the second time all is clear, shining,
fitting wholly into the wheel of time.

Paint Me White is part of my study work, which looks at the relationship between textile materials and glass, and at how textiles might be rendered in glass. Weaving is an ancient art form found in every culture. It has been used from the time of ancient Egypt to the present day and surrounds us every day. I wanted to express this in glass and to bring the two art forms closer together. I am interested in both, but my true passion is glass. I believe I can develop this process further and bring it not only into my gallery work but also into architectural glass installations.

The collection of engraved cups currently numbers ten mould-blown objects. Each is made using an experimental glassblowing technique: it is decorated with graphite and a playful minimalist drawing and blown with the help of trailing. The objects can be presented as an installation.

Modern social civilisation is built on industrial prosperity, yet this order makes people’s lives insignificant, as delicate as the qualities of glass: coldness and fragility. I use a geometric model to express this idea.

Sometimes when I look at the sky, I see rainbow clouds. The sight is so beautiful and unreal! When people long ago saw rainbow clouds, they thought it was a dragon. What if rainbow clouds really were a dragon… My work was born from this kind of imagination. I rendered the dragon’s scales by cutting, and the colour represents the rainbow clouds. My imagination and the stories in it have greatly influenced my work.

I would like to introduce my diploma project, Soluble Lives, created at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, where I work on biodegradable urns. It builds on my earlier projects on funerary design and experiments with salt; these two themes resulted in a funerary urn made of salt. The salt urn is made from three kilograms of sea salt and is intended primarily for burial at sea, where it dissolves completely. The texture of its surface represents human skin, which is specific to each person, for example through wrinkles or fingerprints. The interior version in glass uses the process of crystallisation: the salt forms by itself into tiny salt flowers, each of them unique. The whole work alludes to the impermanence and transience of this world.

Fragile Identity? is only an appearance; the essence is hidden in each of us, in discovering our full potential. We need to learn from nature, where different animal species live together in one community and share their experience by offering their unique qualities.

Fragile Identity? is an invitation to reflect on flow, courage, change and adaptive growth.

My work captures the moment when Narcissus scoops water from a pool into his hands and glimpses his reflection. My aim was to portray this moment by concentrating light in a small glass cup that fits in the palm of a hand, in which the reflection of that moment is mirrored on the crystal-clear surface of the water.

My time abroad also inspired the work: Norway and its nature enchanted me with their untamed wildness. The semester influenced me not only artistically and technically; the outlook of people from another country, their lives and their work, and the whole environment were new to me. Rauland is a small town of about 1,700 inhabitants. Telemark University College has its building near Lake Totak, the tenth deepest and twentieth largest lake in Norway, and it was the lake that captivated me most. Its vastness and power make a very strong impression when you stand on the shore watching the regular waves breaking on the rocks, or the mountains mirrored in the calm surface. Nature itself can surprise you, too, when it floods the shore after rain and you cannot go where you had planned. Walking around the lake, I realised how different the real feeling was from photographs and from my expectations. I wanted to capture this movement of reality in my work.

I therefore decided to use the differences between the materials to create a kinetic object. I was also interested in the work of the world-famous American sculptor Alexander Calder, whose objects are regarded as the very definition of the mobile in kinetic art. What struck me was how simply the overall form is resolved: it is structurally solid, yet the objects can be set in motion by the slightest breeze. I wanted to use this effect in my work too. A light breeze or a strong wind is an important element, rocking both the surface of the lake and my kinetic object.

The result of my bachelor’s project is an object consisting of a glass pyramid, which expresses stability and strength. The pyramid is enclosed within a ring of hammered copper that symbolises water. A light touch or a puff of breath is enough to set the copper element moving, but only as far as the glass form allows. I would like this work to express my sense of the immensity of the element to which water belongs, an element that never truly stands still.

Anteater from the Ocean is a hybrid project combining natural elements and the animal kingdom. I focused on the most important qualities of glass: structure, depth and colour.

This troubled me. The peach demanded space for itself. From which sphere should I interpret it? A point of reference? An opposite pole? An environment? Society? From this search a new form developed. Now the two forms come into contact with each other, establishing a place that has been given meaning by their mutual relationship.

Natural Geometry Set is influenced by the mathematical patterns found in nature. It was inspired by rhododendron bushes, whose blossoms are made up of five-petalled clusters that together form a remarkable visual pattern. The technique I used is called pâte de verre (glass paste). Natural Geometry Set uses digital modelling and 3D printing to achieve the pentagonal shape of each part of the sculpture. My intention is to give the viewer the impression of an X-ray, or of a cross-section through the inner structure of rhododendron flowers.

Laozi said: “The highest virtue is like water.” My work ZhongYu is like that: it shows water that is calm, deep and of benefit to all things, seeking harmony between people and nature while bringing peace and kindness.

Developing an empathy with glass is an emotional response to the idea of capture and constraint. Working with mild steel wire on a frame structure is a matter of collision, and the ways of presenting the work led me to further uses in combination with glass. Control and Deflect was presented as a lighting system, but its individual parts can also be used as additional pendant lights, table lamps or wall lamps.

The ambivalent nature of glass, at once material and invisible, makes it a very fitting medium for portraying the intangible: a human being’s personality, thoughts and emotions. These are aspects of our lives that are undoubtedly part of our existence but cannot be grasped or explained rationally. A dream, an impression, a hunch, the will to do something stand in contrast to conscious perception, thought, deliberate reasoning and decisive action.

The irrational is the opposite of the rational.

Most of the time we try not to show our feelings, because doing so is often seen as a sign of weakness: we expose ourselves and make ourselves vulnerable. Yet there are situations in life that can hardly be put into words. Often they are experiences that stir emotions touching our innermost selves.

My installation Emotional Crack consists of a glass object combined with photographic work. The surface of the cube seems wounded, covered with an intricate network of cracks. Its closed geometric form stands in contrast to the fragile shell, which evokes injured skin.

The photographs, installed in a way that recalls a strip of film, form a set of biographical snapshots. They capture unique moments and emotionally charged memories.

All three parts of the installation are connected in form and content. Time plays an important role both in photography and in making the blown object. The emotions at the heart of this work are evoked through fragments of memory. In the same way, the fleeting, immediate feelings and states of mind that shape the final form of the glass object are part of the work.