Watery Wonder 1

Watching others at the glass studio experiment with hot-extruded, curly stringers gave me some ideas to experiment with.  I currently have a jellyfish painting in the juried show at the Bonita Center for the Arts. It is a 12' x 24" painting that is primarily water and one jellyfish.  Watching these undulating, gelatinous swimmers is mesmerizing.   I decided to further explore some of the visual properties of "jellies" with glass.  

Freestyle fabrication - gravity stringer, dichroic frit, clear and reactive white glass hand shaped on grinder, with heavy shelf paper cut to create 3-D surface for cap and 3 tentacles.  Tack fired.

When these curly stringers emerge from the bottom of the kiln, they are screamin' orange, molten HOT.  Their irregular lengths, diameters and shapes make it fun to locate just the right ones for a specific application.  Often they are tangles and nest-like in their accumulated mass, but fortunately (and surprisingly) they are not fused together in this big, unruly heap! 

Freestyle fabrication - gravity stringer, dichroic frit, clear and reactive white glass hand shaped on grinder, with heavy shelf paper cut to create 3-D surface for cap and 3 tentacles.  Tack fired.

It becomes a puzzle, of sorts, to place these convoluted stringers on the flat surface, to create an image, prior to firing.  Not only are the stringers wavy from side to side, they are also three dimensional - adding to the challenge.  When heated they transform from 3-D to 2-D.  The essence of carefully planning is to predict where the elevated portion of the stringer will melt and relocate to when fired.

Freestyle fabrication - gravity stringer, dichroic frit, clear and reactive white glass hand shaped on grinder, with heavy shelf paper cut to create 3-D surface for cap and 3 tentacles.  Tack fired.

On this particular piece, I also cut heavy fire paper to elevate specific portions of the shape to add a subtle 3-D effect to portions of the jelly.  I am not sure this adds enough visual diversity to warrant the process, but I am glad I tried it.  I do find the overlap of the curly strings and chunky, clear and dichroic frit to be very visually interesting.......a jelly caught in time?????