BECOMING: GLASS ART, BODY FAT, AND A PAIR OF OLD JEANS

Last year, during a late studio clean-up in the mould room, I pulled my back lifting something I had no business lifting alone. Not dramatic, just a weird twist, a heavy mould, and then three weeks stuck in bed. No hotshop. No casting. No sculpting. Just pain, stillness, and time to think.

That injury marked a shift. For the first time, I saw my body not just as a vehicle for making glass art but as a fragile part of the process. Just as breakable as the material I was working with. It became clear that if I wanted to keep making contemporary sculpture using heavy moulds, cast forms, and working in the hotshop, I needed to be strong enough to do it. That realisation lit the fuse.

I began taking my health seriously. I changed how I ate. I moved more. Over the course of a year, I lost 30 kilograms. Not for the mirror. For the studio. For the furnace. For the mould room. The hotshop became my gym. Working with molten glass was exercise. Carrying pipes, lifting crucibles, kneeling at the bench. Every movement became part of a full-body practice that mirrored the transformation I was undergoing.

While on exchange at RISD, my body kept changing. My clothes started falling off me. One pair of jeans in particular — loyal, sturdy, paint-splattered — no longer fit. But instead of discarding them, I decided to repurpose them as material. They became central to a sculptural glass work about change, memory, and physical becoming.

The work tied together three separate glass forms using strips of those jeans. Two were hot cast drips. Thick, slumped glass forms that oozed downward like something melting off. They felt bodily, fatty, soft. They referenced the weight I had carried, the mass I had shed, and the molten viscosity of hot glass itself. Always on the edge of collapse and form.

Close up of 'melting' glass and jeans textiles

The third element was a glass vessel cast from a mould of a cow stomach. An organ I had been fixated on long before my back betrayed me. Its folds, textures and weird biological logic felt sculpturally rich. In this piece, it became more than surface. It became a symbol. The stomach as a site of digestion, transformation, vulnerability. It was about the interior becoming exterior. Taking the unseen parts of ourselves and giving them form, material, presence.

Hot cast cow's stomach wrapped glass vessel

This work lives somewhere between sculpture and autobiography. It uses recycled materials, cast glass, cold connections, textiles, and the language of the body. It asks how the discipline of glass art can hold a mirror to the discipline of reshaping your own body. How transformation is not always dramatic. It is often messy, slow, sticky. Like pouring into a mould that does not quite fit yet. Like tying together old materials to hold something new in place.

It is not a before and after narrative. It is a process. A becoming. A kind of soft resilience built from hot drips, cow guts, and a pair of too-big jeans.

Because sometimes you fall apart just enough to remake yourself. Viscous, vulnerable, and completely on purpose.