The ORB Project

The routine in the glass studio is what I find most exciting about my practice, and working with hot glass gives life to my experience as an artist. My interest in physical human-object interactions begins here, in the hot glass studio, inherent in the methods is a reliance on others to create work successfully. The collaborative processes in the hot shop create scenarios of physical interaction that are the basis for this ongoing collaboration.

Through a mutual interest in the shared potential of this fact, I immersed my research into collaboration with Professor David Covey (OSU, Department of Dance) to create The ORB Project – an ongoing investigation of process and movement primarily using glass, light, and bodies.

To date, The ORB Project has become an ever-evolving semiabstract performance. It reinterprets the marriage between physical experience and material, which is rooted in craft and fundamental to my glass making processes. Our collaborative performance follows a structured improvisation format informed by the everyday movements of the glass studio and performed through dancers’ interactions (and reactions) to my large-scale blown glass spheres (orbs). By embracing the differences in our understanding and use of the mutual interest of glass, light, and performance, Covey and I hoped to reveal a new approach or interpretation of their relationships.