Artist Statement

Glass is a haptic material consisting of many intangible and intuitive processes. It is the process of working with this amazing material that influences my thoughts and movements.

As an embodied process, I shape the material, an invisible director in the background; staging, observing, working and developing my conceptual understanding and intuitive experiences with material. Starting with the experiential process of making, I focus on a particular notion of glassmaking and allow the experience to develop into something else. Then, within the experiential expression of making, I seek alternative frameworks to document and articulate this conversation I have with process, including photography, video, installation, screen printing.

As a trained glassblower I use my skills and experience to work in a more sensual way with glass, using the material as a poetic tool to create. I explore the unseen subtleties and nuances of the material. So as to use my skills consciously in a transformed manner, to create abstracted forms in an alternative context, to remain in the material and to capture certain moments during the process of making. My aim it to truly understand the material, and initiate an expression where I relinquish control.

Glass is so interwoven with our daily lives. It exists not only of function, but also independently as an expression of creativity. As a mirror, as a material of luxury and as an essential part of our modern digital world, glass additionally suggests a sensation of transience and a sense of human life and the ephemeral moment.

This material is not only a symbol of contemporary society, it also reflects different ways of seeing - but does it make things clearer?

In consideration of this question, I undertook a project titled Litbrig∂i Ljóssins within the vast landscape of the Snæfellness in Iceland. I exposed and observed a large orange rectangular glass plate - in a variety of location and weather conditions. It left nothing behind except traces in the snow. Photography was used to record the intersection of this symbol of modernity and the surrounding natural wilderness. As an object and as a surface, the glass sometimes repelled light and at other times let the light pass through, so as to almost disappearing from view.

The resulting body of work, Litbrig∂i Ljóssins, includes a photo installation, series of silkscreens titled Erinnerungen (Memories) and an artist book.

What is tangible? Where is the limit? When, how are we aware of our own fragility?

These questions are also addressed in Obstupescere. This body of work followed on from Bubbles, a project where a series of fragile bubbles were created with my breath - as thin as possible, inflated in one go from a small amount of hot glass, I followed the process of inflation, and subsequently piled the bubbles to create a billowing installation that reacts to the surrounding movement of air and reflects the installation environment - despite the material's transparency and fragility.

Seeing oneself in the mirror of glassmaking, reflecting and thinking about what is not visible, I work with process to create a tension... and wait for the moment that articulates the edge of glass's materiality. I entre the glassmaking process and build up this tension until the moment arrives.

Finding that moment - to capture the insensible.