For my final blog post I wanted to talk about my Fleaves piece that is currently on display in the corner gallery in the Lied Art Center! I came up with the idea for the Fleaves piece last fall semester in my Senior Seminar class. As you may have learned from past blog posts, I am really interested in the natural processes of nature. This interest and curiosity about how things like rain, wind, water and other moving natural processes function make its way into my everyday thoughts and dreams. 

The idea of fleaves came from a couple of dreams I had of fish and leaves combining! Natural currents that certain fish move and flow through within the ocean and in natural waterways somehow got linked to how leaves move through wind currents. I think it helps that leaves and fish have somewhat similar geometric shapes to them also! But I thought it would be fun to show this meshing of fish and leaves in a visual way, so using glass, I went about creating fish and leaves flowing into and becoming “fleaves”!

At the time of its creation, I was still exploring the relationships weaving and glass could have with each other, so I decided that the ambiguous currents that the fish, leaves, and fleaves would be moving through would be woven and knotted. The giant woven current part of the piece took a lot of time and patience and was threaded with wire so that I could keep the piece sculptural. The glass elements were made using the Pâte de Verre method where I sculpted each individual fish/leaf, made a mold of it, and then filled that mold with glass frit and fired it to a solid! I really enjoyed the process of making this piece and I am very happy with the outcome. Getting to display it in the corner gallery has been a treat!

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