A Freeze and Fuse Summer Garden.
Flowers, Leaves and a few Surprises.
Ah, the journey of creating an art piece! The past few days I have been working on this fused glass panel for an upcoming art exhibition in Stourbridge. The brief was to create a postcard sized piece that could be no bigger than 2 cm deep. The exhibition is titled Thanks for the Memory. Now, I had a good think and some of my best memories involve being out in nature, I just love being surrounded by flowers. I live in a town, so I only tend to see flowers when walking past people's gardens or during the odd visit to a park, so I have tried to bring lots of colour into my own garden. Now, I'm not a gardener, far from it! But I do love planting wildflowers. And one of my best memories was just sitting in my back garden in Summer surrounded by flowers of all different colours and just soaking up the Sun. Bliss!
So how did I transform this tiny rectangle of glass into a representation of my summer garden? Through the magical process of freeze and fusing flowers, leaves, and butterflies. Yes, you read that right – I decided to play it cool, quite literally!
Freeze and Fuse is an almost magical technique of taking powdered glass, mixing it with water, packing it in a silicone mold and freezing it. This frozen piece of unfired glass is then put in the kiln and fired. It is magic as the piece fuses before it falls apart. With the amount of silicone molds available the sky's the limit of what you can make! I chose flower, leaves and butterfly molds and set to work! It took me 4 days to fuse the amount I wanted; this time made me want a larger kiln even more! Once I had all my bits and pieces made, I set to work arranging them on my white glass base, This was such fun!
The process was nothing short of a lesson in patience!. Picture this: a grown adult, hunched over with a pair of tweezers, meticulously arranging tiny flowers leaves and even smaller murine! Butterflies were included to give the piece some movement and I chose my colour palette to make it look and feel like a warm sunny day.
As I made the piece, I couldn't help but get more and more excited to get it in the kiln so I could see the final result. This is always a problem for me, I really have to work hard not to rush! But as it came together, I grew to love it more and more, I hid little surprises here and there, a caterpillar climbing a stalk and a ladybird are just two of them. I held my breath and put it in the kiln to fire, I did a contour fuse as I wanted it to have lots of texture and for the flowers and leaves to keep their details.
Twenty-four hours later and it was out! To say I am pleased is an understatement, I just love it! It is so bright and cheerful! I can't wait to see it in the gallery, I hope other people love it as much as I do!
