People often ask me why I work with optical glass.
The answer isn’t straightforward.
I didn’t begin with optical glass. My first encounter with glass happened during a summer workshop with two artisans in Barcelona, where I was introduced to the material through window glass. After that experience, I spent several years experimenting on my own, trying to understand what glass could do and how I wanted to work with it.
I realized that my interest wasn’t in glass as a colored material. What fascinated me was transparency and optical illusions.
I experimented with colored glass for a while, but eventually decided to focus on clear optical glass. I haven’t looked back since.
Today, I work exclusively with Japanese eco-optical glass from Ohara. What attracts me to it is its purity. There is something almost paradoxical about a material that can be physically present and yet appear invisible at the same time. It occupies space, but often seems to dissolve into light.
That tension continues to fascinate me.
Light, transparency and perception
What interests me most about optical glass is the way it interacts with light. Its transparency allows light to travel through the material in ways that are difficult to achieve with other sculptural media. Reaching this level of transparency requires an extensive process of polishing, much of which takes place after the glass leaves the kiln.
Working with optical glass means accepting that what we see is rarely fixed. Depending on the viewing angle, the surrounding environment, and the quality of light, the same sculpture can appear completely different.
Internal reflections emerge and disappear. Details that were visible one moment may seem to vanish the next. This constant change is one of the qualities that first attracted me to optical glass and remains at the heart of my practice today.
