GLASS, STEEL AND GOLD
Reverse-Glass Gilding Repurposed
Not long after I fell in love with the craft of sign painting I became obsessed with its grandest technique: reverse-glass gilding.
The process of taking a material as delicate as loose-leaf gold and applying it to glass to create a mirrored gold surface is something I’ve explored ever since.
But what really evolved my practice into something distinct was integrating steelwork fabrication into my pieces.
I took inspiration from artists like Frank Stella and Ellsworth Kelly and began to weld steel frames for my glass artworks that broke apart the form.
The work became more sculptural as the steel frames allowed me to explore presenting these glass gilded panels in more playful and expressive combinations.
2019 - 2023
The most recent iterations of this style of my work have begun to integrate photography into the glass. Found images or ones I’ve taken of my own body are abstracted and rendered as mirrored gold halftones, letters are made out of limbs rather than brushstrokes.
2017-2018
In April 2018 I had my debut solo exhibition ‘Just For Us’. The collection of work I made for that show focused on using my steelwork to divide up words into panels of single letters, disjointing, rearranging and reflecting to play with their meaning.
2014 - 2016
The earliest works in this style all focused on short elemental words or phrases that could be interpreted in different ways depending on the viewers associations.
