I took on an ambitious project for autumn semester in my advanced glass topics class at Ohio State University. The class was really interesting because the topics for the semester were student-driven. We focused primarily on professional development, with requirements to apply for fellowships, residencies, scholarships, juried art shows, and to develop an artist statement.
I've been doing some of those activities for years in my wood practice, but applying to a juried art show in glass was a new adventure. I did apply to a glass exhibition, and was juried in. That was exciting, but my work wasn't in the show because it suffered a catastrophic event. Oh well, at least I was juried into the exhibition.
The most interesting and rewarding part of the semester for me was developing a new body of work, making pate de verre leaves. I gathered leaves from the silver maple in the backyard, made 20 plaster molds, and proceeded to make six pate de verre leaves just about every day from the third week of September to the Sunday before Thanksgiving. I ended up with 187 glass leaves for a wall installation, plus about two dozen to place on the floor. The title of the work is "Autumn."
I installed them the Monday before Thanksgiving, in time to show the work to my class the next day. I used the mobile wall in the clean space for the installation. That was a good choice because it allowed me to move the wall out of the clean space when other students needed it for critiques and reviews.
My class had an exhibition the evening of December 3rd, and we had the clean space the next day to do our documentation of our projects. The morning of that documentation day, Tom Hawk from Hawk Galleries stopped by to see my installation (thanks, David!). We had a lovely conversation and Tom invited me to show my work at his gallery, and he would like to have it in time for his December open house (Dec. 13–14).
I installed the work in Hawk Gallery December 9–10, and there are five of my wood pieces there as well. Hawk Galleries is at 153 East Main Street in Columbus, Ohio. You can explore work from many awesome artists at www.hawkgalleries.com.
Autumn, as installed at Hawk Galleries. 12’ X 8’ X 5”
Here’s a detail of one of the glass leaves in Autumn.