Lis Simpson

Thanks to Lis Simpson for sharing her new work with us. 

Lis will be at Studio 4 along with Deb Kirk, Florence Booth and Rita Staniford.
Four artists, one location!

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During a spiritual retreat this summer, a new artistic vision came:

Creating exquisite, small art glass of light, colour, and texture for inspiration and transformation – beads and beyond into objets d’art!  Look deep inside to see what may come.

Immediately after I went to a four-day intensive workshop in Advanced Fusing at Glasstronomy Studio in Markham. The primary focus of the workshop was using and creating molds for glass fusing in the kiln.

This is one of the projects we did, and some pieces I have made since for the studio tour:  making and using plaster cast models.

We used flexible molds into which we put the plaster slurry.  Remember to be careful when disposing of plaster – never put it down your drain!

 

I love shells and other objects from the sea.  Doesn’t this look perfect?

 

Next we needed to build the frame on the kiln board to hold the objects and to put the glass over them.

We were doing two blocks at the same time so there was a common wall between them.  In one of the blocks I put a fern leaf to look like seaweed as well as plaster shells.  The smaller block merely held a plaster shell.

Then we had to continue to reinforce the walls so the molten glass in the kiln wouldn’t leak out!  Don’t want a mess!

In order to cover the objects well, we put in clear glass frit, which is tiny bits.  We covered the objects up to their tops.  I also added some blue and green frit to the smaller block which had the single shell.

We added several sheets of clear glass to the very top and into the kiln they went (Glasstronomy uses a large kiln, so there were two different projects being fired at the same time.  See my pieces on the bottom right?)  What a wonderful surprise when the firing was complete!

Here’s the front view.  The fern burned away too much, and I couldn’t see but just a faint image.  So I decided to use glass paint to fill in the “seaweed”.

Here’s the second block with the blue and green tint and the single shell.

 

‘Course, then I wanted to make some more at home.  Others like this one will be at the Studio Tour in October.  I have such a fantastic time creating with glass.