Glasscapes

Glass has been part of my life for decades.

I started with stained glass — and I loved the colour, the way light moved through it, the reflections. But it wasn't doing what I needed it to do. It was flat. It wasn't alive. I kept experimenting, kept playing with glass beads and found objects, kept looking for the thing that stained glass was almost but not quite.

What I didn't realise then was that I had been preparing for this my whole life. I have been collecting shells, coral and ocean materials since I was a child — picking things up off beaches, knowing they were worth keeping long before I knew why. Decades of gathering. Decades of loving the way light catches a piece of glass, the way a shell holds the memory of the ocean inside it, the way certain things are too beautiful to leave behind.

Then one day I found a fish plate in an op shop and thought — I can make a reef scene out of this. And one thing led to another, and another, and the glasscape was born.

A glasscape is a mixed media artwork built on glass or perspex — tempered glass, casement windows, any form that calls for it. Hundreds of glass beads, reclaimed ocean materials, shells, coral, found objects, each one individually placed and resin-set by hand. The subject is as wide as the world itself — reef scenes, night skies, forest canopies, landscapes both real and imagined. What defines a glasscape is not its shape but what lives inside it.

What I love most is what light does to them. In the morning they look one way. In the afternoon, another. Under a lamp, something else entirely. They don't just sit on a wall — they move with the light, shift with the hour, change with the season. I love that I get to create something more than just a picture. The intricacy of placing every element so it looks alive, so it actually appears to move — that's where I live when I'm making these.

Glasscape is my word. I coined it to describe something that didn't have a name before I made it. Every glasscape is an original world, built one piece at a time, and no two could ever be the same.

I will never stop making them.