Glasscapes™

Glass has been part of my life for decades.

I started with stained glass, I loved 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, glass beads, beach glass and found objects, kept looking for the thing that stained glass promised but didn't quite deliver.

What I didn't realise then was that I had been quietly preparing my own art form for my whole life.

I have been collecting since I was a child - picking things up off beaches, knowing they were worth keeping long before I knew why. Decades of gathering - sticks, stones smoothed by rivers into something that fits perfectly in your hand. Different sizes, different colours, driftwood carried downstream and left on a bank like a gift.

I collected so much that was special, from the rainforest floor to the reef, from the creek bed to the shoreline.

Then one day I found a fish plate in an op shop and thought - I can make a reef scene out of this - it is glass and I have an old coffee table top........one thing led to another, and another, and then......Glasscapes™ 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, 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 or size, 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.

Glasscapes™ 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.

And I will never stop making them.