In the summer of 2019 I set out to change a beach into glass.
In Cornwall, seaweed was once gathered, burnt, and sold to the glass industry as flux, to lower the melting point of sand enough for it to become glass. My work ‘Porthmeor’ is made from small panes of kelp glass set in copper. The sand for this piece was gathered from Porthmeor beach in St Ives - directly in front of my studio windows. It is installed in the Borlase Smart room at Porthmeor Studios, where you can look at the beach through the lens of itself.
Beach sand from Porthmeor and the Helford River were blown into simple roundels. The Helford sand becomes a seaweed-green glass (iron). Porthmeor is blue (copper).
Kestle Barton Gallery on the Lizard Peninsula in Cornwall hosted my solo exhibition Flux in the Summer of 2021. Displayed alongside the glass roundels, and woodblock prints of kelp, my short film ‘Flux' considers the work of the summer of 2019.