Porthmeor, 2021. Glass made of sand from Porthmeor Beach, with steel frame. Installed in the Borlase Smart Room at Porthmeor Studios.
Kelp Glass Roundel, 2021. Glass made from seaweed and Helford river sand, with steel frame. Installed as part of ‘Flux’, 2021, Kestle Barton, Cornwall
‘This glass is a beach refined by hands and then fire, shaped by breath and gravity…’
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.
Sand from Porthmeor beach and the Helford river were blown into simple roundels. The Helford sand becomes a seaweed-green glass (iron). Porthmeor is blue (copper).