In transparent glass, colour occurs through the absorption of certain wavelengths of light, and transmission of other wavelengths. In thicker sections of glass, more light is absorbed than in thinner sections, making the thicker sections appear darker, and sometimes a different hue. This phenomenon is called volume colour by Joseph Albers, and together with the optical properties of glass as a denser material than air, leads to remarkable possibilities for glass artists, to work with form to achieve light accents and/or different hues in solid object made from a single transparent glass colour. Artists in the Czech republic have explored this potential in cast glass since the 1960s, working directly with colour factories, and passing on gained knowledge through teaching. Elsewhere, it is difficult for artists to explore these possibilities for two reasons: Firstly, the lack of literature on volume colour, and the difficulty of translating theoretical information on optics into practical application. Secondly, on the practical side, it is unusual for artists to work with factories to develop their glass colours. Instead, colours are available in a limited range of hues, and casting colours are developed for small to medium sized objects around 5 cm thickness, therefore often appear very dark or black when used for larger solid casts of more than 10 cm thickness. To explore the relationship between colour, form and light in glass sculpture, artists need to be in control of colour hue and value. To achieve control, they have to either work with a factory, or colour their own glass. This research contributes to the practice of kiln casting through the development of methods to produce homogenous transparent colours in a studio environment, using ceramic crucibles in a kiln. Visual and written guidelines about basic colour results using single colouring agents provide a starting point for development of bespoke hues and densities. Drawing on physics texts and through a thorough study of existing glass sculpture, the optical properties of glass are explained in relation to practical application.

This practice-based research addresses internal form in cast glass. That is, ink- like imagery, which is wholly contained within clear, colourless glass. For the purposes of this project, ‘ink’ refers to liquid ink as is used in Chinese brush painting and calligraphy rather than to ink applications such as those used in print media. The aim is not to use ink itself. Rather, it is to emulate ink, rendered inside glass, while exploring the material similarities between the two media, including their liquid properties and their ability to be worked opaque or translucent. The project examines the interface between control and chance; where the artistic process ends and the unique properties of glass take over and are governed by heat, time and gravity. It also addresses the transformation of two- dimensional line drawing and ink wash into the third dimension. My research question is how the kiln and furnace casting processes can best be exploited to render the fluid, gestural and expressionistic immediacy of brush and ink painting, three-dimensionally, in solid glass. Following 14 years of studying and making art in Korea (1997‒2003) and China (2003‒2010), I have developed an affinity for brush and ink painting and, more specifically, for Chinese Grass script calligraphy and traditional landscape. This project aims to explore various methods of capturing apparent gesture and spontaneity in cast glass, in the form of ‘ink’ abstractions that evoke these styles of Chinese painting. My methodology includes identifying and isolating the elements that characterise Chinese brushwork in calligraphy and landscape painting, which are intimately linked fine art forms in China. Studio tests include manipulating different types of glass to create a dynamic, rhythmic, assured and graceful ink aesthetic, interpreted in the third dimension. I use flameworked inclusions to explore ink-like line and experiment with glass powders to evoke different intensities of ink wash. All tests are recorded in detail and are used to anticipate and loosely control glass movement. My research into Chinese brushwork characteristics is used to identify a framework within which the studio work sits. The variety, order and combination of techniques used to create the work constitute original knowledge in the field of cast glass. My method for reinterpreting the characteristics of Chinese painting, including line quality, ink wash, composition and balance, embedded three-dimensionally within the framework of cast glass, also contributes new knowledge. Based on systematic research and analysis, the terms ‘casting’, ‘moulds’, ‘spontaneity’ and the ‘third dimension’ are examined and defined anew.

Everything that happens takes place somewhere, in a particular physical or cultural space. The character of a place is constituted, its distinctive timbre generated, by the constellations of events occurring in it and how those blend, interweave and play out over time. Such textural qualities infuse and inform our experience of places, they shape our ‘knowing’ at a visceral level that goes unnoticed in our ordinary lives. Our conscious awareness of the places and spaces we visit and inhabit is filtered by our interests, honed through habit, marshalled and constrained by conventional perceptions of what matters. The contingent qualities of places beyond the purposes they serve for us are rarely considered and harder to attend to. But if we want to appreciate the world in its own right, not just in ours, finding ways to do so seems worthwhile. Artists adopt a variety of strategies to penetrate beyond the more obvious features of place. Some seek estrangement through the systematic application of arbitrary rules, others through strenuous efforts of will. I use ways of looking and thinking that are grounded in my experience of training as a glassmaker and developed using photography and video. My approach employs a broadly defined ‘glass sensibility’ that encompasses both the physical abilities of glass to mediate visual perception and their metaphorical correlates as shapers of ideas. My mode of enquiry is the essay, a flexible and open-­‐ended form of reflexive investigation that is highly attentive and responsive to its subject matter, and follows where that leads. But unlike other essayists who pursue their trains of thought in lines of words, my attempts at understanding are more visual. I explore my chosen places -­‐ a bus, a train, a road junction, a kitchen, a forest, a park, a desert -­‐ by spending periods of time in them doing whatever being there generally involves whilst also noticing how things happen and taking photographs. What I’m looking out for are telling facets, small examples of conjunctions of events which I can somehow ‘cut and polish’ at the critical angle that aids transparency, letting light in on the intrinsic character of the place and making it sparkle. The substantive outcomes of these essays are new awarenesses that bypass language; but each is accompanied and supported in the thesis by a textual account of how it came about. The contributions made by this thesis are three-­‐fold: It expands the repertoire of strategies for appreciating place, develops a novel understanding of how glass-­‐based thinking may inform processes of exploration and offers a new, more literal, version of essayistic reflection.

The visual system generates the perception of a world of meaningful three - dimensional objects from a stream of retinal signals – in the psychologist Richard Gregory’s words ’images in the eyes’. When this perception is consistent with information from other sources such as the ears and the muscles that guide movement, all is well and we are almost entir ely unaware of this process. But when it is not, we see illusions. To adopt Gregory’s phrase, ‘strange phenomena that challenge our sense of reality’ 1 . The project is inspired by the work of the German artist Ludwig Wilding (1927 – 2010), who refined appr oaches to the everyday phenomenon of moiré interference patterns to generate dramatic illusions of depth and movement in shallow box frame structures. 1 Gregory Richard L. 1990. Seeing Through Illusions . Oxford: Oxford University Press. p186 Based on the principle that the intersection of two sets of parallel lines generates the appearance o f a third set of lines, or moiré bands, Wilding’s innovation lay in the discovery that, by introducing a shallow space between the two layers of printed lines and by tilting and rotating them , the size and orientation of the se moiré bands can be manipulate d to produce converging contours and texture gradients that are perceived by the visu al system as forms in depth. This thesis builds on these observations to investigate the potential of the material and optical qualities of glass in combination with moiré interference effects to generate inconsistencies between th e images in the eyes and the objects that produce them, creating illusions of space.

Can creative material translation reshape artistic appropriation to escape the cycle of mimicry and mockery linked to contemporary visual art practice? To explore creativity in material translation, my project has been divided into three case studies, each translating a different pattern, from a different context and material, into my chosen pattern-making language of glass murrine. In the first case study I translate a Moorish plasterwork pattern from the Alhambra, in Granada, Spain. This pattern has been copied before: a translation of fidelity printed by Owen Jones in his publication The Grammar of Ornament, 1856.1 Jones’ pattern and my patterns will be used to examine fidelity and infidelity in material translation. In the second case study I translate Paisley, a Kashmiri textile pattern appropriated and adapted by western manufacturers in the 19th-century. Paisley's history of adaptation will be examined in relation to my translation, to compare the two methods in the context of a single decorative idiom. In the third case study, I translate a stamp- printed furnishing textile pattern designed by Bernard Adeney in the 1930s. This translation will be an isolated interaction between two makers, a similar position to the critique of contemporary visual appropriation, allowing for a comparison between infidelity and appropriation. Murrine has been chosen as my material language because of its ability to create patterns with colour, depth and unlimited variation. The murrine technique involves the heating up and stretching of canes or sheets of coloured glass, arranged in designs that become very small when elongated. These stretched lengths are then cut in cross-section to form mosaic tiles. Developed by the Greeks and Egyptians, the murrine technique has been under constant development for the last 2000 years. I have further refined the technique, incorporating new methods such as waterjet cutting. I have made final artworks from each set of murrine in the format of flat glass panels, each exploring its pattern in a unique way. An examination of each artwork, its process of translation – including drawings, computer models, photomontage and other designing methods – and its material and contextual change will forge the link between making and writing in this project. My original contribution to knowledge is the exploration of a practical act of visual translation, analysing material change and creativity. The project serves as a model for material translation, questioning the contemporary act of appropriation in both art and culture. The project developed through my rejection of contemporary practices of appropriation, along with my passion for the spiritual nature of pattern and the glass technique of murrine. My theoretical framework is built around the linguistic concept of ‘creative translation’. Linguistic theorists such as Jorge Luis Borges ‘treated translation as a creative force in which specific translation strategies might serve a variety of cultural and social functions’.2 My project will adapt this linguistic concept to visual practice, investigating its relevance to material language.

A turn away from language and the human mind as the dominant (or only) determinants of reality can be identified within many disciplines, including anthropology, philosophy and literature, reflecting a growing acceptance of human and non-human, living and non-living entities as real, complex and partially withdrawn agents in the world. In Object Oriented Ontology the definition of object is extended to include humans, who have no special ontological status. Timothy Morton proposes rhetoric as a means of drawing closer to other objects, of contacting the ‘strange stranger’; objects cannot be known directly, or fully, but can be explored through imaginative speculation. Drawing on Object Oriented Ontology, my project explores making - an intimate engagement between body and material - as a means of thinking the body as a (strange) object within a mesh of strange objects. Facture is documented as image and language, prompting a series of shifting, speculative questions: • Can writing be brought to making to generate new new approaches to craft production? • How might writing in response to making, or objects, be reintroduced into a making process as a form of feedback? • Can writing_making methods generate new approaches to writing (about) making and materials? • How might a combination of production, documentation and reflection be displayed as artwork/research? • Can making be seen as a means for contacting the ‘strange stranger’?