Quantum mechanics states that as a black hole ingests stars, planets, little green men etc., all the information of its feasts should be preserved in its depths. But we know from Stephen Hawking that these devourers will fizzle away one day. So what, then, happens to all that data?
Youngho Park, whose work appears to render those event horizons in biotic veins of lampwork glass, asks similar questions. His corpus’s central idea is the image of an ink drop in water, which for him suggests a memory falling deep within the mind, settled but able to be stirred back up. In the pieces he makes by fusing glass rods, one by one, with a torch, the Korea-based artist stows many reminiscences. ‘Glass is rarely made alone. All those little conversations become part of the work.’
Complex arithmetic and 3D-modelling software were once essential to Park’s craft, but things are now more intuitive: ‘My hands understand decisions I once had to calculate consciously.’ The hardiness of borosilicate glass assists with this organicity, allowing him to ‘selectively heat and reshape small areas as I go, creating subtle movements that feel fluid and alive, like they have grown naturally’.
So shall the artist’s practice, he hopes, from these medusoid forms to bigger installations. Currently, he’s fired up by working with fellow artists in his native Cheongju; his greatest driver is ‘feeling we are all connected, like parts of a larger mechanism’. Long may this manual mathematician drink up the world and give its memories eternal life.
Visit Instagram @younghopark__
By Leyla Spratley
Lemon rinds unfurl languidly, eternally, over calm precipices of tables, boards and bowls in Dutch still lifes – perfect calligraphic curlicues of pith. But in place of Willem Kalf’s drupaceous loop-de-loops, Elliot Walker serves up a crystalline prawn cocktail with a virtuoso flourish of wire-thin antennae in static glass. Except it’s anything but staid: ‘I’ve become a collector of the odds and sods of glass-making techniques,’ he explains, modestly, of the library of complex processes constituting his creations: from blowing and carving to cutting, polishing, engraving and pulling.
He’s no material purist, though. ‘If I could make the finished work another way, I think I probably would,’ he suggests, before countering, ‘which is what I love about it – if it’s not quite right, you can heat it up, and just grab it and turn it.’
This is particularly pertinent when it comes to his coupe of shrimp. They display a light-footed delight in working the molten ends of glass, twisted into curled-up crustaceous approximations. And where they fail on photorealism, Walker contends, they triumph on feeling: ‘I try to make something have the essence of its form.’ It’s this glassy quintessence – a glimpse ‘into the life of things’ (as Wordsworth reflected), wrought through fire and sweat into formal elegance – that sets him apart from the ubiquity of studio glass’s wobbly ‘blobs’. His work deceives those who think it familiar; his marie-rose sauce has a citric kick.
Visit Instagram @ewalkerglassart
By David Lipton
L’appel du vide – the call of the void – is sometimes experienced as the shocking impulse to stick our hands in fire. Or to grasp molten glass. Mesmeric, viscous, bright as flame – who doesn’t feel the urge to squeeze such a syrupy substance between one’s fingers? Artist George William Bell – based in the aptly named Sand City, California – has overcome any such compulsion by creating custom tools that extend his hands, allowing him to shape the material from within as a potter might sculpt clay. The fluid, sometimes bobbled forms he manipulates ooze out from special moulds that allow the glass to expand in different directions, while a finish of silver nitrate and sand-carving creates a softly glowing skin. The result is lava-like vessels that appear arrested mid-flow.
Rock ground to sand, sand melted to liquid glass, liquid glass blown to luminous vessel: glass also contains time and is an artefact of it. ‘With glass, a gesture of seconds can be captured and made permanent for centuries,’ as Bell notes. ‘Glass doesn’t have a single melting point,’ he explains; to keep it ‘alive’ requires constant heating to prevent thermal shock. ‘Even once solidified, glass continues to communicate that it was once flowing,’ he adds. ‘Few materials retain such a vivid memory of their own making.’ One might heed the void and touch these almost-liquid objects. Like running a finger through a flame and finding you haven’t been burned.
Visit Instagram @georgewilliambellstudio
By Alice Inggs
‘I have what I would describe as a diffuse practice,’ Isabella Kullmann says of her fusion of techniques. Glass strata are precisely tiered – hollows of diffused light beside layers so compact the light can barely make it through, and vivid green-blue turns almost black. This dense hue is a result of her material: Pilkington float glass, or the panes in your windows. She ‘was not trying to imitate blown glass or cast glass, but to find a language or a character unique to the process’.
She first sketches her ideas, then models them using computer software, sending meticulously planned modules to be precision-cut by water jet. She joins these at home before finishing the piece with physical glass-blowing. For the latter, she works with Liam Reeves, warming the pieces in a reheating chamber before temperature and centrifugal force do their magic, opening the pieces up until they take their compelling final forms. Kullmann’s practice is quietly radical. Not only in its novel use of material and process, but in that it can largely be done outside the studio, without need for regular access to a hot shop and the costs of a furnace.
Glass facilities in the UK are increasingly threatened – before this magazine went to press, the National Glass Centre had closed. In this squeezed environment, Kullmann is forging a new frontier in her field. Her work will be on show at the British Glass Biennale from 28 August to 1 November.
Visit Instagram @isabellakullmann
By Rose Eaglesfield
Cathryn Shilling’s fluid woven sheets begin as strands of 1.5-metre-long clear glass. She clips them to length using a brightly coloured abacus to keep count as she goes. They are then carefully assembled into flat grids that are fused together in the kiln to create ‘blanks’ – rectangles of interwoven grids of glass resembling swatches of knitting. Once cooled, they return to the kiln at a lower temperature to encourage the material to ‘relax’.
With a little help, the sheets slump into different positions, like fabric fluttering in the wind. Each emerges from the heat differently and (with the lightest touches from Shilling) has its own personality. ‘It’s not quite luck,’ she says, ‘it’s experience.’ She achieves the striking hue by means of vacuum-coating the glass in 24-carat gold, making the front of the piece gleam with a solid colour while the reverse remains clear. ‘It’s like when you go out and you’ve got all your make-up on,’ she notes, ‘but that’s not actually what you feel like because behind it you’re fragile.’ This notion is also reflected in the fluidity of her forms, which stands in stark contrast with their rigid and breakable nature.
Some 17 years into her relationship with glass, Shilling is still seeking new innovations. Thanks to a Qest Winch Design Scholar grant, she is researching methods such as gilding, painting and processing images on glass. Her work will appear at Homo Faber 2026: An Island of Light until
30 September.
Visit cathrynshilling.co.uk
By Ariadne Fletcher
‘There is no hidden meaning to me doing acorns; no metaphor.’ Dante Marioni’s responses to questions are blunt. But perhaps that kind of honesty is preferable to the puffy philosophies of the ‘artist statement’. My enthusiasm was rightfully placed in the annealer.
The son of a lauded American glass artist, Marioni began blowing at 15, but soon desired a more rigorous training than the ‘studio’ tradition could give. He received it under Venetian master Lino Tagliapietra. The reticello decorating the acorn shown here is a glass-blowing technique invented in Venice. It involves stretching the material into long molten canes and snipping them into even lengths, which are rolled on to a plug of clear glass. By rolling, blowing, and spinning, the straight rods are turned into ever-thinner twists, incorporated into the surface of the glass. The process is then repeated from the start, with the bands of colour being made to twist the other way. The second piece is inserted inside the first piece and they are rapidly blown together into one perfectly aligned cross-hatch, before the shaping proper begins.
Unlike many other Venetian glass techniques, reticello does not encourage the artist to communicate virtuosity by adding more (flourishes, colours, ideas). Instead, skill is conveyed in refinement: better reticello simply consists of even thinner lines, neater alignment and more precise distortion as the matrices cope with the flares and waists that the shape dictates. Marioni’s art is lacing its way close to mesmerising perfection.
Visit dantemarioni.com
By Ruth Sleightholme
‘Quite frankly, the reality of working as a craft potter was a bit much,’ says James Lethbridge. Now based in Belgium, he initially trained – in ceramics – at Bretton Hall College, but found the required grunt work to be somewhat graceless. ‘You had to get up early and start turning out the pots, and then you had to empty out the kilns. It kind of killed my passion.’
Still, that discipline has informed his current work as a creator of handsome light sculptures and objets enlivened with tendrils of flameworked glass. ‘The whole point of being a craft potter is that you’re able to bang out the same pot a hundred times, and that does translate into [my practice], which is repetitious,’ he says.
After taking a free glass-blowing course in 2003, Lethbridge studied at the RCA, where his passion turned into a full-time practice. He often starts with an antique vessel – tall and elegant ‘with a bit of a belly’, ideally. (‘There’s a lot of bonbon jars that are just fat and short with ugly handles,’ he laments.) Otherwise, he turns to glassmakers Devereux & Huskie, who produce forms to his specifications – as with the work shown above. In both cases, the end product is coated in thousands of glass ‘thorns’ whose shapes draw heavily on the natural world – the twist of a certain vine, say, or an image of microscopic pollen. Such organic abstraction is exactly the appeal of glass, he says. ‘It’s light, it’s bright, it’s fluid – it’s an obvious step for the material.’
Visit Instagram @jcpcl79
By Alice Kemp-Habib
A version of this story appears in the October 2026 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers
