Spider Web

Inspiration for this piece comes from my love of the intricacies in natural found objects, places and their form.

Marion, who runs the flower shop at Kingfisher Farm shop in Abinger Hammer, was looking for a piece for display in the winter. She always designs very innovative displays.

The idea was for a cobweb on a rusty gate to show a Secret garden that no one has been in for years.

On a dewy morning last summer I took lots of photos of cobwebs and plants laden with dew.

A cobweb was a perfect subject to explore with warm glass - that is kiln fused, not blown (which is known as hot glass ).

In October 2005 I bought a couple of rusty gates on eBay, perfect, and set about designing my fused glass cobweb.

I wanted to use both lead and glass in this piece to show the diversity of application glass work affords. The whole piece took about 3 weeks to complete as the firing cycles are very long, 14/16 hours.

Included in the fused pieces is some dichroic glass. Dichroic glass was first manufactured for the aerospace industry and is made in a vacuum, spraying on a thin film of oxides and metals. The wonderful properties of dichroic are that if on clear glass as used in this piece it displays one colour when looked through and another with reflected light.

This space age technology is another fantastic string to the warn glass artists bow! -and in the cobweb really makes it sparkle as if on a dewy morning. It could also be seen equally as if it were made of ice.

I made the piece, attached it to the gate and passed the baton to Marion and her team who then decorated it with greenery and lighting.

It has been a talking point - enough to attract a reporter from the local paper who wrote an article about the web, marions dispay and the farm shop!