Blog

Sawtooth Kilnformed Glass in Rockville

 

Last month, I made another sawtooth kilnformed glass piece for Fallsgrove Plaza, a new medical office building in Rockville, Maryland, designed by DVA Architects for Lerner Enterprises. Something interesting that I didn’t know about Rockville is that they have a city ordinance requiring new developments to include publicly accessible art! The ordinance exists to “preserve and enrich the visual character and environment of the city.” I like it!

I make a lot of work utilizing sawtooth kilnformed glass, but I realize I haven’t talked much about that technique here on the blog. For the uninitiated, it essentially starts with sheets of fusable colored glass — in this case, I used Bullseye Glass — which are fashioned into tiles with a sawtooth relief. I cut up sheets of the colored glass into strips which are layered up, much like making a collage. These are fused together at about 1300° resulting in a flat rectangular tile. In a second firing, the flat tiles are brought up to about 1500° in stainless steel molds with a sawtooth relief. At this temperature, the glass is hot enough to settle into the mold, but not so hot that the colors swim around. At the site, the tiles are mounted to tempered glass — the same super strong glass that is used in the side windows of cars, shower doors, and racquetball courts, to mention a few common uses.

 

 

I named this piece “It Might As Well Be Spring,” after the 1945 Rogers and Hammerstein hit that has been recorded by so many different jazz legends (Sarah Vaughn, Miles Davis, and Nina Simone, among many others). Choosing titles is always a difficult task for me. I usually have to wait until the piece is fully installed in its new environment before I can make the call. The colors also play a big role, as they often conjure associations with music, poetry, or other literature. That’s what happened with this piece; when I stepped back and looked at all that green and yellow, that song immediately popped into my head. I figured it could be an uplifting meditation for people moving through the space, no matter what time of year. Plus, there’s talk of a fertility clinic moving in, which would give it another whole layer of meaning!