Glass: myth and dreams

I just want to write down a few words about glass and the plans I have to develop a few projects with it in the future. There are many questions we have to ask about glass before one decides to start working with this material. First a few scientific basic ideas:
Glass is amorphous and unorganized material... so we are forced to qualify it as a liquid even though it is rigid. There is no structure, pattern or crystalline organization of any sort. The fact that glass is cooled so quickly it doesn't allow atoms and molecules to crystallize properly. So we end up with a "frozen Liquid" and this fact led to a ridiculous myth which says that if we wait many years glass will slowly "melt" down, becoming thicker on the bottom and thinner on the top. This is not true but could be used to do a series of shapes related to this myth. The reason why people think this is true has to do with the construction of the old glass windows in churches and cathedrals. These were made out of lots of little bits of hand made glass with a lot of thickness variations and the people that built them knew that the window would be easier to build and would last longer if they placed the thickest side down... It would just make it more stable like a pyramid. The mistake/problem happened when people started analyzing these panels a few centuries after and realized the glass was apparently "moving" due to the action of gravity. It was just an illusion but an interesting one.

I don't know how many contemporary artists are using glass but the craft techniques are not obvious and require a long learning period. People that manage to learn how to use it spend too much time becoming skilled technicians and do not have enough input to be aesthetically sensitive and change their approach to this highly skilled work that is almost always kitsch. The exceptions are usually specific commissions.

There is one more thing I like about glass. It is made out of sand. I know it's a special kind of sand. But it still connects me to those sunny moments on the beach when everyone just came from the ocean and the sand quartz crystals are shining like diamonds.

Great art works that I admire were made out of glass. The Large Glass Duchamp painted and framed is a great example. It's almost like the Mona Lisa of conceptual and language base art.

Other friends have been using glass sheets in the past few years... Filipe Rocha da Silva is making probably his best work ever with glass in his Lisbon Studio. Cabrita Reis paints glass frequently. Craig Cooper started exploring its reflective properties last year using black paint. Another Portuguese artist did exactly the same for the Venice Biennale but I can't remember his name because I didn't like his work.

Let’s make a reference to the fact that working with glass is dangerous. Both Craig Cooper and Duchamp ended up exhibiting broken glass. It is something a practitioner has to be ready to deal with. It will have to be taken as a natural development. It is something that will always have to happen. Sooner or later the glass will be in bits like any other art work. The main difference is that with glass everything happens in a moment making it much more dramatic and intense.

When I start using glass in the future I will have to try to play around with its interaction with metal, paint, layers, lights, architectural references and immersive experiences. Glass is cold but protects us from the outside. Glass is expensive. Glass is a bad heat conductor. It usually brakes when warmed up unevenly exactly because of that. It's rigid, the heated area expands, the other side doesn't... bum! It's always a remarkable event if there are no injuries.

When I start using glass I'll only need rectangles and squares of several different sizes. My work will happen on its surface, frame, layering and assemblage. For now I'm only using Perspex. That will change after summer time.