History

This body of work emerged after Hurricane Helene led to a series of closures across the Southeast that reshaped the glass community. The loss of Mountain Glass and Level 42 shifted the landscape for many artists at once. In that context, I began working with what was already here: discarded glass bottles an overlooked material of daily life. What started as a way to keep working became something else, a project about what limitation makes possible, and what skilled attention does to a material the world has already decided is finished.

Most bottle glass ends up crushed into asphalt or terrazzo filler. In academic and institutional settings it has long been dismissed as unsuitable for serious work, too unstable, too variable, too limited in what it can become. What I found, drawing on techniques from scientific glassblowing and flameworking traditions rarely applied to recycled material, is that bottle glass can be worked with the same precision and control as purpose-made material. The perceived limitations were less about the glass than about the assumptions surrounding it.

The turning point came when I stopped treating the bottles carefully and started treating them like glass. Once I attached a borosiliacate blow tube and began working the material the way I would work any other glass, turning it, shaping it, drawing it out, everything changed. A wine bottle contains enough glass to yield a tazza, a tumbler, and a goblet. What had looked like a constraint revealed itself as a starting point. The same material the world discards as waste contains, in terms of sheer volume, what would take three hours to prepare from raw borosilicate rod. The bottle is not a limitation. It is a gift that hasn't been opened correctly.

This is not a project about reduction or restraint. It is about what skilled attention makes possible, and about turning limitation into ritual. The same process-driven thinking that runs through my broader practice applies here: repetition, precision, and a commitment to resolving the material fully. Thin blown feet on small goblets. Stems pulled to the same standard as any Italian tradition would demand. The source material is not disguised. It is the point. The industrial geometry of the bottle, its neck, its shoulder, its particular green or amber, becomes part of the object's formal language.

Some pieces push further into that tension. One body of work uses the factory-blown neck and lip of the bottle intact, a readymade form with its own glass history, joined to a stem using a Dewar seal, a technique borrowed from scientific glassblowing. The result is a double-walled cup that appears unable to hold liquid but is fully sealed and functional. The bottle's origin is not hidden. It is held up.

The work sits at the intersection of material hierarchy and craftsmanship. Objects that would otherwise be discarded are subjected to the same care and technical rigor applied to the finest flameworked glass. What is common becomes considered. What is usually forgotten is instead finished. These are not objects that ask you to overlook their origins. They ask you to look more carefully at what origin means, and what a material can hold when someone decides it is worth the attention.

← Back to Material Echo