What influences translate into your art practice?

In one word: interlacing. My basic approach to the work of art is influenced by my worldview that everything is connected to everything in a web of networks: people and nature, the self and the other, person and society and culture, action and matter. Interlacing is a state of reciprocity, of dialogue and attention, and of mutual influences, between people and themselves, and materials and processes.

My practice as glassblower requires teamwork and collaboration. Interlacing is both a guiding factor in my material creation and a metaphor to my work with others.

What’s the significance of the handmade to you?

Craft and working with my hands are my passion. My imagination has been captured magic of material transformation of glass in handmaking know-how. Handmaking is what makes it human, the ultimate expression of human capacities, body and mind, thought and matter. It is the primary demonstration of human creativity, the essential liveliness of people as makers. In the present social distancing of covid-19 epidemic, handmaking is an essential path to wellbeing, a cultivation of hope.

What is your chosen medium and what are your techniques?

My chosen medium is furnace glassblowing and experimentation with semi-defined moulds, canes and traditional ways of doing. I engage in experimentation with traditional techniques because I believe that innovation in handmaking may be cultivated through dialogues with the rich traditions and cumulated know-how of local cultures. Semi-defined moulds, which allow for many degrees of freedom enable dialogues between glass as matter and me as creator, with my intention to allow the glass “to speak for itself”.