I love coloured glass. Stained cathedral glass windows, fused glass sun catchers and hand blown glass baubles to name a few forms of coloured glass.  I love the alchemy of sand being heated, mixed with minerals and oxides to create colour, translucent and reflective qualities that mimic the sea, the light shining through trees, sparkling ice and frost.

I have been attending a Fused Glass Course at goretreestudio.co.uk and my first piece that I created was a glass sun catcher that I created using the colours of the ocean, from the deep blue to the shallow translucent waters that lap the shore, as inspiration.  I think glass is the best medium that captures the qualities of the sea,  It is the sea frozen in glass form.

I then was inspired by the sunrise colours in the sky over the Cambridgeshire Fenland,  whilst driving to work one morning.  At first I created a few ink sketches to capture the colours I saw and then used the colours to create a sun catcher, a wave and a curve in glass at my next fused glass class . The combinations of colours are unusual but I think they work well together and I believe that these can be developed into a theme in pottery as well as in glass and in paint.

Fused glass is a bit more forgiving that stained and copper foiling as with the later, you have to be quite precise in cutting and fitting your pieces together to make a sturdy creation, With fused glass, you do need to have access to a kiln to fire the glass and you need to have the space and facilities to house a kiln.  Facilities that unfortunately I haven’t got at the moment, therefore my foray into fused glass is a bit limited at the moment, but who knows what the future holds.