Syed Ahmad
Salisbury, NC
My method is improvisational. The glass sheets I have at hand and the image in my mind will do their dance back and forth. The medium imposes its will as much as the artist does. Immersed in paradox, I allow for intentional accidents and planned surprises. While the creative work is done at room temperature, the final outcome is not apparent until after the process of kiln-firing.
The improvised collage of glass is placed in a kiln and fired to around 1400 degrees Fahrenheit. At this temperature, the pieces of glass begin to flow and fuse, blending shapes and colors. The colors I use are from a specially coated dichroic glass, in which color is created not from pigment but from a thin film coating deposited onto the glass in a highly technical industrial vacuum chamber.
These specialized “interference” colors were first developed by the aerospace industry as an optical filtering device having the property of splitting white light into two opposing spectrums of color. One is reflected, the other is passed through. The process also selectively reinforces certain wavelengths of light while interfering with other wavelengths, thus the term “interference”. The reinforced wavelengths are perceived by the human eye as being highly saturated in color. The dichroic’s interesting properties allow me to stack the glass in many layers to achieve significant visual depth in an essentially two dimensional piece.
I invite you to look deeply into the work, observing the changing hues as you move across the piece, engaging with glass as a living medium.
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